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FAITH GARTNEY S GIRLHOOD. 

HITHERTO : A Story of Yesterdays. 

PATIENCE STRONG'S OUTINGS. 

THE GAYWORTHYS. 

A SUMMER IN LESLIE GOLDTHWAITE'S LIFE. 

WE GIRLS: A Home Story. Illustrated. 

REAL FOLKS. 

THE OTHER GIRLS. 

SIGHTS AND INSIGHTS. 2 vols. 

ODD, OR EVEN? 

BONNYBOROUGH. 

BOYS AT CHEQUASSET. Illustrated. 

MOTHER GOOSE FOR GROWN FOLKS. Illustrated 
by Hoppin. 

HOMESPUN YARNS. Short Stories. 

ASCUTNEY STREET. A Neighborhood Story. 

GOLDEN GOSSIP. Neighborhood Story Number Two. 

The above^Novels and Stories, each i6mo, $1.25; the set, 
17 vols, ^21.25. 

BIDDY'S EPISODES. A Novel. lamo, {1.50. 

SQUARE PEGS. A Novel, lamo, Ji.jo. 

FRIENDLY LETTERS TO GIRL FRIENDS. i6mo,$i.2S. 
THE OPEN MYSTERY. A Reading of the Mosaic Story. 
i6mo, $1.25. 

THE INTEGRITY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE. i6mo, 
$1.00. 

JUST HOW: A Key to the Cook-Books. i6mo, $1.00. 
DAFFODILS. Poems. Illustrated. i 6 mo, 51.25. 
PANSIES. Poems. i6mo, 51-25. 

HOLY-TIDES. Seven Songs for the Church’s Seasons. 
i6mo, illuminated paper, 75 cents. 

BIRD-TALK. Poems. Illustrated. Crown 8vo, 5 i.oo. 
WHITE MEMORIES. i 6 mo, 5 i.oo. 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. 

Boston and New York 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


BY 

Mrs. a. D. T. WHITNEY 
I) 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 
VLU Riberjsitie Prerf.rf, CambriDae 



,^‘'3 


LIBRARY of CON(5HES3j; 
Two Copies HbCOi?jL 

APR 1908 

tjopyrijprii cniry 

A p^y. 3 ^ 3 

3LA» A }(Aci 

Z o 3 3 53 

COPY B. 


COPYRIGHT 18S0 BY HOUGHTON, OSGOOD Ar CO. 
COPYRIGHT 1908 BY THEODORE T. WHITNEY 


ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 


k 





CONTENTS, 


CHAP. PAGE 

I. Between 6 

II. So Queer ! 13 

III. Farm-Yard and Kitchen 22 

IV. Polite to a Butterfly 35 

V. Hide and Go Seek 44 

VI. Hay-Swaths and High Courtesy 48 

VII. Sarell and East Hollow 54 

VIII. Good at a Hold-back 63 

IX. The East Room at East Hollow 68 

X. The Great Pyramid 81 

XI. Brackets and Interlines 91 

XII. The Red Quarries 97 

XIII. How Much More does It take? 102 

XIV. Mountain Fogs and Clear-running Waters . . . 109 

XV. In the Ring or on the Road? 135 

XVI. The Hay Parlor 140 

XVII. The Dam Pasture 151 

XVIII. The Power and the Parts 174 

XIX. A World for Mb 193 

XX. Night and Morning 203 

XXL Sunday, and a Sermon 213 

XXII. Monday 231 

XXIII. Plans, a Plot, and a Pleading 240 

XXIV. Day Dawn in the Dairy 255 

XXV. It must take care of Itself 261 

XXVI. “ Not Half Good Enough ” 266 


IV 


CONTENTS, 


CHAP. PAGE 

XXVII. “Old Thunder” 273 

XXVIII. The Sense op It 284 

XXIX. Crowned Head . . . ' 290 

XXX. Safeguards 313 

XXXI. Bolts and Bonds 327 

XXXII. Cash and Investment 340 

XXXIII. “ Walking Pride 348 

XXXIV. Hobgoblins 355 

XXXV. Shows and Disquiets 366 

XXXVI. Drift 376 

XXXVII. Twenty Questions 383 

XXXVIII. The Prodigal Daughter 391 

XXXIX. Benedicite 396 

XL. Quit-Claim 401 

XLI. Number Nine 408 

XLII. The Free-Will Chance 419 

XLIII. Mother Pemble’s Ultimatum 432 

XLIV. Sarell gives Odds and comes out Even .... 441 
XLV. Nine from Nought, and Fellaiden News . . . 462 

XLVI. “ Those Dozen Years of Ours ” 474 

XLVII. Chimes 481 

XLVIII. Outside with a Dark Lantern 488 

XLIX. Rose-Glories 497 

L. The Best Word 603 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


CHAPTER I. 

BETWEEN. 

“ Middle-class ! I ’ve no patience ! ” said Miss Ammah, with 
her nose nearly horizontal. “We’re all middle-class. We’re 
all between somebody and somebody else. But you need n’t 
be middling. It’s only middling that’s mean, anywhere.” 

“ And yet, Miss Ammah, your grocer’s ftimily — ” 

“ Grocer 1 What ’s a grocer ] Look in your Webster. Your 
father ’s a grocer.” 

“ Why, Miss Ammah ! Papa sells cargoes," 

Miss Ammah was great on etymologies. “ What his vessels 
are charged with, that is 1 ” 

“ Of course — I suppose so.” Tjie two first words came at 
once, the last three dubiously and slower ; as if the girl, be- 
tween her periods, mistrusted that she might be jumping into 
a trap. 

“ And Mr. Raxley sells what his warehouse is charged with. 
Where ’s the difference ? ” 

Euphemia spoke now. It had been Helen before. 

“ Papa studies the world,” she said proudly. “ He brings 
things over the seas. The other man takes what he brings and 
sells it over a counter.” 

“The other man studies his neighborhood and what his 
neighbors want ; but you have reason, Euphemia. Only they 
both stand between ; that is what I said. And it is a round and 
round. Nobody is actually bottom and nobody is actually top, 
any more than they are on the globe.” 

“ And yet there is a top and a bottom and a between to every- 
thing that exists on the globe,” said Frances, — “ society. 


6 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


schools, families. I know, for I ’m a between ; and that ’s why 
nobody settles or thinks where I ’in to go this summer. Phemie 
and Helen have got invitations, — they always have, — and the 
little ones are to go with mamma ; but I ’m skipped, so far. I 
suppose I shall be perceived and picked up, somehow, in the 
packing, as other odds and ends are. Not that I ’m an end,” 
she corrected herself, saving her unities of speech, “ only an 
odd, — number five, tucked in at the middle.” 

Nobody minded Frances and her queer sayings. She was 
always an odd, as she declared. 

“ This doesn’t settle the calling,” said Euphemia. “ I don’t 
know why we should worry to return a visit that was altogether 
accidental, any way, when we can’t keep up the acquaintance, 
and there are loads of people we really do know, and owe to. 
We shall never get round.” 

“ That comes of taking your friendships in cargoes,” quoth 
Miss Ammah. 

“ And of being so lovely to the accidentals when you did n’t 
mean anything continuing ; practising the high bred that is too 
high bred to be sniffy, when you’re going to turn out sniffy 
after all,” said uncompromising, clear-sighted France. “For my 
part, I’d rather go see the.Raxleys any day than the Talfreys. 
Btit w'hy can’t we be like the planets 1 ” she concluded suddenly, 
with the utmost freshness of simple suggestion, and looking up 
innocently, as she paused for information. 

“ Don’t be utterly nonsensical ! ” said Euphemia impatiently. 
She thought France meant something about being high and 
established enough in the firmament to shine on all alike ; 
and if there was anything Euphemia could not bear, it was 
the slightest hint that there was any effort in their social life, 
or that they needed to be “ like ” anybody. 

“ Am 1 1 ” asked France meekly. “ I was only thinking that 
they never go out of their orbits. They just let the conjunc- 
tions come about as the way leads and the time comes round. 
Why can’t people keep on their own ways, and meet and be 
pleasant when it happens so ? Why must there be duty calls 1 
so called because duty is exactly — ” 

“Now don’t quote Lucus — ” 


BETWEEN. 


7 


“ I 'm not going to. Don’t do it yourself.” 

“ Don’t you really know what you are going to do with your- 
self, — what you ’re going to be done with, — this summer, 
France 1” Miss Ammah shook her head at the maid offering 
her a superfluous hot waffle, pushed her chair back from the 
table, and turned her face suddenly toward Frances, where she 
sat with the cat in her lap, teasing its ears. 

“ No, ma’am.” 

“Then come with me up to Fellaiden.” 

France had brought it down upon her now, the others 
thought. Neither Helen nor Euphemia wmuld have gone to 
Fellaiden to pass the summer for anything. There was a dead 
silence in the room for forty seconds, partly because all of 
them were also struck with wonder at the invitation itself; 
since Miss Ammah, able to monopolize and pay for it, had held 
on to Fellaiden as a monopoly for the last five years. She had 
discovered it ; she paid seven dollars a week for her board, 
where the price was only five, and had everything her own 
comfortable way there : hence, she was not disposed to open 
it to irruptions and demoralizations, even when her especial 
friends intimated how much they should like to come up for 
a few w^eeks, if there w'ould be room for them. Upon the si- 
lence the door opened, and Mrs. Everidge, the mother of the 
young ladies, came in. 

“Mamma,” cried France, “Miss Ammah w'ants me to go up 
to Fellaiden with her this summer. Do you suppose she 
means it 1 ” 

Miss Ammah took up her knitting from a basket on the 
4tag^re, and left them to settle it. 

“ How should you like it 1 ” asked Mrs. Everidge, used to the 
family friend’s original ways. 

“ Middling,” said France demurely. 

“ There ’s nothing middling, you’ll find, at Fellaiden, France 
Everidge,” said Miss Ammah. “Yes, there is, too; it’s two 
miles up a three-mile bill.” 

“ A funny kind of middling,” said Helen. 

“ It ’s their kind,” said Miss Ammah. 

“ I ’ll go,” said France. “ I never got so far up in the world 


8 


ODD, OK EVEN ? 


as that. It’s just the step beyond for me. There’s a fate in 
it. Only the . middle will be dropped out of this family, and 
they ’ll miss it. They ’ll be all old ones and little ones, and 
nobody to fall back on or be handed over to. I am sorry for 
the Everidges.” 

You notice she had not thanked Miss Ammah at all for her 
invitation. That was simply because Miss Ammah always 
liated to be thanked. 

I wish to moralize in about three lines. A mean condition 
in life, between any two in genuine order, is not contemptible, 
as Miss Ammah has said. The mean condition is to feel mid- 
dling, and to refuse the fact. Then comes pretence to the fact 
one considers be3mnd, and that is the meanest condition of all. 

The Everidges were a nice family, pleasant among them- 
selves, and with much possibility of pleasantness outward from 
among themselves. They were only in danger of being spoiled 
by the thing that Miss Ammah attacked, and I have put in a 
moral. For though papa did studj'^ the world, and bring things 
from over seas, — which was rather a grand way of express- 
ing that he owned two or three barques and schooners, among 
other things, and brought sugars and coffees from wherever in 
South America or the West Indies he could buy and load from 
largest and cheapest crops ; that he received consignments of 
finer specialties from the Mediterranean, and even the far 
East ; that he had invested in a Florida orange-grove since the 
w’ar, and made a good deal of money every winter, for the first 
few years, on the trips of the Foambell to the St. Johns, — and 
though, besides all this, he had, like the rest of the world, after 
the big Rebellion let all latent rebellions loose, slidden from his 
old-fashioned, steady, inherited business into the nominalities, 
and made lucky dips into stocks and bonds, — as lucky with- 
drawals, also, by that rare instinct of probabilities which gets 
ahead of storms in trade, as the calculators at Washington get 
ahead with their cautions of the wheel and march of cyclones, — 
and so had stood for a keen man and a bold operator among 
business men, and represented to his family and immediate de- 
pendents and admirers all the kingdom of the commercial world 
and the glory of it, — this was not the whole of possible height 

t 


BETWEEN. 


9 


or sure-fast place, and they all knew it. It was a way and a 
h^lp to something, but it was a thing of to-day in itself, and tch 
morrow might change it. Rather, even, was it not alread}',. in 
essential respects, the thing of yesterday, which the hard, un- 
certain, shifting to-day was fast changing from all established 
centre and solid, confident advance 1 

“ Papa studied the world.” They had learned that by heart, 
and to be proud of it, almost in their babyhood ; but the world 
had been something of a queer, uncertain book to study in the 
later times, with the whirling of its leaves in the wind, and 
the shutting down of chapter after chapter, till it seemed 
as if the whole volume of the current order of things were ta 
be closed up, perhaps ; and men, missing the old lines and con- 
nections, felt themselves failing in their hearts for fear, as the 
cross readings turned to threatening prophecies. 

Mr. Everidge held on through the depression and the closing 
in : that was all the bravest and the strongest could do. That, 
for him, gave standing and honor of itself ; he was as proud of 
that as he had been of his push and energy in the time passed 
by. The household and social life went on, if not altogether as it 
had done in the gay, lavish days, yet without fear of stop or 
any pinching stint ; and the measure and the consciousness of 
the life went on with it. It was still the measure and conscious- 
ness of a making, as Mr. Everidge had made his money by 
enterprise fresh in the memory of all. It was not complete,, 
asserted beyond assertion : it depended much on the continu- 
ance of the external condition that wmuld let it go on making, 
and fulfil its chance before its chance should fail. Above- was. 
something that had been born, not made ; had been large and 
assured in all its generations ; that waited now, under loss and 
pressure, as a thing distinct from all such circumstance ; that 
had become a little more withdrawn and difficult, instead of Itess, 
during the quietness of days adverse. 

Money, its elusive unreality so newly and everywhere proved, 
was, even where apjjarently retained, hardly the passport that 
it had been. People did not w^ant brilliant strangers with 
passports now : there was a reversion to the natural-bom and 
long-abiding. The stand must at least be upon some hi^ sort 


10 


ODD, OR EVEN V 


of verity and growth. Towards such stand, for whose attainment 
fair time is needful, and on their way to which the hard time 
checked people just where they happened to be, if it did not 
send them absolutely rolling down again, the Everidges were 
still conscious of precisely that slight upward strain that is a 
pleasure in its successful putting forth, but becomes a pain 
when it has to halt and hold its own. It told them that, broad 
as the brow of the hill might be, and almost insensible its gra- 
cious slope about the crown, they were yet on the slope, not 
the apex, — between that and the ruggeder dividing ridges and 
drops below ; so, in a sense, middling, as Miss Ammah said. 
But when Miss Ammah put it into words, it made them, — the 
elder ones, — as we have seen, a little fractious in their feeling. 

France, the very middle individual of them all, with two sis- 
ters just older and taking the gloss off her dream of life by try- 
ing everything first and handing back the remnants to her, and 
two younger who demanded her time and her clothes faster 
than she could spare them, cared less, I think, for the collec- 
tive middlingness than any of them. In fact, she w^as getting 
the beginning of certain theories of her own, rather rebellious 
against society ; so that Euphemia said to Mrs. Everidge, after 
the Fellaiden plan had been decided, “ There is one thing, 
mamma : she will come home worse than ever about her calls 
and her politeness, after Miss Ammah and the farm people.” 

Perhaps here, in a couple of paragraphs, I had better tell you 
who Miss Ammah is. 

Her name — the rest of it — is Tredgold. She has n’t a 
near relative in all the world, but she is family confidante and 
adviser and bosom friend to a score of families. And she won’t 
be breveted “ Aunt.” She is always, among these friends, Miss 
Ammah. She visits in town and out of town. She knows 
bankers and bakers. In the pretty suburb where the Everidge 
“ Place ” has been set up, she runs up and down, and is wel- 
come, from Pine Hills to the “ Corner ” village. Within this 
distance are the usual gradings and shadings of suburban family 
and neighborhood, from the old people whose estates, in the 
time of the grandfathers, had been cut through by the first 
turnpike, to the newcomers into the last French roofed, turreted, 


BETWEEN. 


11 


modern-convenienced dwelling on the last street laid out near- 
est the city limit, and built upon in a hurry, with one idea for 
twenty houses, just before the pulse of the annexation fever, six 
or seven years ago, went down. 

Miss Ammah Tredgold does not “ live upon her friends.” On 
the contrary, her friends live so much upon her that she can 
only plead one visiting engagement against another as any ex- 
cuse ; and a dozen households are ill-used in their feelings if 
she ventures to stay more than a fortnight at a time at her own 
handsome moorings in Hotel Berkeley'. Her sole chance of 
any soleness is her yearly hegira to the hills of Fellaiden. 

She disappears with the dropping of the crocuses and daffo- 
dils, sometimes with the last snowflakes even, and is only 
known to have disappeared into a region where few citizens or 
suburbans would be tempted, if they could, to follow her ; and 
is spoken of as in the fastnesses, “ somewhei e.” They all know 
that, wherever it is, there is nothjng going on there ; it isn’t 
“a place,” at all, only a nook for one. She is as safe as a fox 
in her burrow. And now it was decided that France, the odd 
one of the Everidges, should disappear with her. About this 
there were already several minds in the family, — several 
minds in the parental mind, — although it w^as, as I have said, 
at once decided. 

The minds began to come out that same afternoon, when 
Miss Ammah had gone up to the Pines to stay her promised 
three days with the Johneses. It would be told of there, and 
it could n’t well be taken back now, but it would remain to be 
accounted for. For the Everidges held themselves, in some 
tacit and mystical fashion, as bound to account to the Johneses 
and the Talfreys and the Sindons — to say nothing of the Pyes 
whom I will speak of separately, presently — for all their new 
movements, as on some basis of reason recognizable to orthodox 
society; to show cause, of course all tacitly, and by way of 
merest natui'al and graceful mention, of their own whys, — why 
a Johnes or a Talfrey or a Sindou would have done likewise in 
the circumstance. They were bound — the Everidges — to 
run against no circumstance even that might not as well lie in 
these other people’s way ; else the Everidge way was obviously 


12 ODD, OR EVEN ? 

divergent, here and there, from the way of the haute volee, and 
was no high flight at all. It had not yet occurred to them that, 
in the great firmament, a different way, that might be a yet 
higher flight, was possible. 

“ It will lose France out of everything for four months,” said 
Helen ; and then Euphemia added the remark about the calls 
and the politeness. 

But it is Miss Ammah,” said their mother. “ And France 
isn’t really out yet, you know.” 

“But she ought to* be in the way to be out, oughtn’t shel 
And as to Miss Ammah, — well, people have her for a week or 
two at a time, and it ’s the fashion to pull caps for her for that 
much : but whether anybody would go off and shut themselves 
up with her for all summer 1 I just wish it weren’t a little, 
five-dollar, up-country, nobody-knows-where farmhouse ! It 
seems rather like tucking poor France off out of our way. And 
she ’s too old to do that with^ and it ’s an exploded idea of the 
third-rate society novels, and I don’t half like it ! ” Euphemia 
said it pettishly, as people say things that it is no use to say ; 
and snapped her Iceland wool, as she pulled the thread from 
the middle of the ball. 

“ You should n’t wind your wool at all,” observed Helen. “ If 
you had ‘ dropped ’ it, you would n’t have lost your thread.” 

“ It should n’t have been either hollow-wound or dropped,” 
said Euphemia, “ but loose-balled over-hand. Miss Ammah did 
it for me.” 

Miss Ammah, it was to be confessed, was not always along- 
side of the latest-accepted ways; and even in winding wools 
there is a latest-accepted. 


so QUEER! 


13 


CHAPTER II. 

so QUEER ! 

Meanwhile, France had put on her hat, and taken some club- 
books which were to go next in order to those ladies, and 
walked over to the Miss Pyes’. 

The Miss Pyes lived in a Bird’s Nest. They had taken the 
name and the notion half a lifetime ago from Miss Bremer’s 
famous Hellevi Hausgiebel, and had been carrying it out ever 
since “The Neighbors” was translated, and they — in their 
teens and twenties — had read it. They never considered the 
joke of its being called the Pyes’ Nest, as of course it was im- 
mediately ; or, if they thought of it, it was of an appositeness, 
not a satire. They never thought, even, of the appositeness of 
their own names, Christian and family. I suppose they never 
had the least idea how they were literally and continually illus- 
trating them. Old-fashioned names of aunts and grandmoth- 
ers, piously perpetuated — really, I meant no play on that 
word — from generation to generation, and kept on record in 
the columns of queer, varied hand-script between Malachi and 
Matthew in the family Bible. 

Charity, and Barbara, and Margaret. Diminished to Chat and 
Bab and Mag among themselves, and even when they spoke of 
each other ; in the most innocent confidence that they were nev- 
ertheless, as they were always politely addressed, “ Miss Pye,” 
“ Miss Barbara,” and “ Miss Margaret ” when spoken of in 
general society outside. Also, it never occurred to them that 
“ Mag ” and “ Pye ” by any chance, got hyphened together on 
common lips, having no occasion to get hyphened together at 
home. In reality, they were most often alluded to and quoted 
under the formula used by Miss Margaret herself, — who, being 
the youngest of the sisters and the most active member of so- 


14 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


ciety, at once represented, gathered for, and voiced them all, 
as “Chat and Bab and I.” 

Everything bright, curious, entertaining, — in things, talk, fact, 
— was collected at the Pyes’ Nest. Mag did most of the col- 
lecting, as I have said ; then they all fluttered and placed and 
admired sidewise, and chattered and babbled over the straws 
and sixpences, objective and metaphorical, that she had picked 
up. No malice about these last; only they thoroughly discussed 
everything in their bird fashion, and came to their conclusions ; 
held caucus and made platform., so to say, and were ready 
with their verdict, — no insignificant one, for that old record 
between Malachi and Matthew was thoroughly honored and 
clear-traced, away back to some Pye who had chanced to light 
on the Mayflower or the Speedwell, and come over with the 
Pilgrims. 

“We all think. Chat and Bab and I.” The summing-up 
was circulated, as the details had been collected, by Miss Mag, 
in her little afternoon hoppings and perchings among the Pines 
and about the Corner. 

So to take the social bull by the horns was to start a fact, 
equipped as you meant it to be, from the Pyes’ Nest. 

France Everidge fully intended now to go to Fellaiden. The 
plan had begun between breakfast and after-dinner to look 
specifically attractive to her. It had also begun during dinner 
discussions to lean down, as it w-ere, on its weak side. Miss 
Ammah was not there to keep it up, and the weight of the lit- 
tle family doubts, with their half expression — a reflex before- 
hand of the “ way it might seem ” — was gathering, unbalanced, 
like freezing mist upon the wundward side of a boiigh. Nobody 
thought of actually opposing or interdicting, — that would not 
be done, France knew, with Miss Ammah’s already virtually 
accepted px-oposal, — but the cold-water spray of half-satisfac- 
tion was flung upon it, and was growing solid, pai’ticle by parti- 
cle, and might somehow break it down. To help that, it must 
have broad sunshine let upon it. France, with a wise instinct 
rather than any deliberate management, held her peace against 
the ifs and buts, took all the previous settlement for granted, 
and remembered her errand to Miss Chat and Bab. 


so QUEER ! 


15 


We are going off to Fellaiden with our heroine, so it is pos- 
sible we may not, in the whole progress of our tale, whose course 
cannot at the outset be altogether predicted, “ keek in ” again 
so leisurely at the Pyes’ Nest. The more, not the less, reason 
that we should take a discriminative look at it now, as France 
sits there with the three ladies, to whom the world has begun 
to look elderly, but with a certain curious sense of themselves 
having stopped somewhere a score of years ago to observe from 
a fixed point the outside process. Now and then Miss Bab 
would discern in a mild way that a winter influenza, or a depress- 
ing summer heat, had pulled Chat down a little, and that she 
ought to have the wine of iron for a while, and take to the glass 
of milk at lunch, — “ that always do set you up again, you 
know ” ; or she would remark anxiously, even of Margaret, who 
kept about on her feet, and brought in a certain open-air bloom 
with her from her daily outgoings, that her color was n’t quiie 
what it ought to be in the mornings, and that she had a bad 
way of settling down into her pillow that “ slept creases into 
her cheeks.” But it never seemed to occur to her that there 
was anything in the casual falling off, or the paleness, or tha 
delicate arcs each side her nose that began to quote Mag’s 
prettiness as something of the past referred to, which prescrip- 
tion or admonition could not reach, as they had done in the 
twenties ; or that the years had anything inexorable to do with 
the “want of accommodation” that the oculist told her of in her 
own eyesight, and for which she wore a ladylike pair of glasses 
over the fine work that had done the mischief “ that winter when 
she embroidered the deep borders for the library portidre.” 

Chat’s hair was undeniably gray, in lines, — “ so early ! ” Bab 
would say. “ What do you suppose makes people, nowadays 1 ” 
And she would instance Pauline Talfrey, “ saow-white, at thirty- 
three ! ” In all this there was the sweetest actual unconscious- 
ness. They told their ages to the census man without reserve ; 
nobody else asked. And between times they really forgot. They 
just went on living ; commented on the changes in society and 
in the town, and compared the things of to-day with those of 
other days, identifying themselves always with to-day and with 
the newest change ; importing all the fresh ideas to the Bird’s 


16 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


Nest, and really keeping themselves wonderfully fresh by virtue 
of their simple obduracy of self-location. 

They had kept house together since they were indeed young 
girls ; and their early orphanage had contributed to their per- 
sistent feeling of being somehow still young things, since one 
always thinks of orphans so, and the church prayed every Sun- 
day for them as “ fatherless children.” 

They had had small means to manage at first, and had lived 
on. the same old carpets, darned and made over, till Mag said 
“ The venerable Brussels in the best parlor was all twine and 
tradition ’’ ; but investments had been turning out splendidly 
for them in the palmy years of inflation, and they had remod- 
elled the cottage and replaced its furnishings, till John Pye and 
his Mag would never have known the Nest again, could they 
have bent their bright wings and alighted suddenly in it. 

The low, painted wooden mantel in the sitting-room, where 
Captain Pye — for he had been a retired ship-master — used 
to keep his briarwood pipe and Indian tobacco-jar, and where 
his odd, crumpled slips of memorandum and calculation — 
oftener than not raggedly torn envelopes, made sacred and de- 
fendus by half a dozen pencilled figures — used to accumulate 
under a bronze thermometer-stand until Mrs. Pye would insist 
on his making a spring-cleaning of his own and beginning 
again, — was now a tall Eastlake, with plenty of real china 
ornaments from Canton ; a whole company of Russian peasants 
and pedlers and soldiers, with Emperor Nicholas First on 
horseback among them, in painted biscuit ; recent additions of 
Japan boxes and caddies and trays ; and gay fans, like open- 
winged butterflies, paired at the corners. Around the room, three 
feet and a half tall from the baseboard, stood great, meditative, 
dull-colored herons, on thei?' stilted legs, with their necks and 
bills looped backward upon humpy shoulders and forward on 
feathery-fringed breasts, each with oiie long-clawed foot hidden 
in water-grasses, and the other set on a broad, floating, weedy 
leaf. There were pomegranates — scarlet flowers and red-gold 
fruit among thorny twisted branches — above, and nothing 
between but a pale-gray, smooth expanse, that might stand for 
pale-hot, tropical atmosphere ; though what the herons had to 


so QUEER ! 


ir 


do with this, and the pomegranates overhead, might be won- 
dered at. Miss Ammah, w'hen she called, had said that the 
herons ought to have been flamingoes ; but Miss Margaret as- 
sured her eagerly that there were no flamingoes at all among 
the dado patterns. They all came in regular styles, and it was 
no use to try to carry out a fancy or a suitableness. She had 
got the pomegranate border because Chat and Bab said the 
room wanted something livening, with all that brown and gray 
and dull green. 

The library, which they once used and spoke of simply as the 
front parlor, had low bookshelves instead of the dado, quite in 
the authorized style ; here and there on the top of which were 
the orthodox little easels, with something in decorative porce- 
lain or cloisonnee or painted tile set on edge upon them, in 
the prevailing charmingly useless way. Whatever nonsense 
was anywhere mixed up, however, was redeemed by the great 
square bay on the southwest side, full of rioting ivies and plumy 
ferns and bright little blossomy plants in bracket-pots and 
along the shelves ; while a perfect bank of splendid calla plants, 
their tall stems and shadowy, winglike leaves like ranks of 
Blake’s strange angels, and the white cups that had begun to 
unroll at Easter not yet all gone from among them, filled up 
the whole floor-tier. 

“ Now that ’s a dado worth the while ! ” had said Miss Am- 
mah. “ If you could get a thing painted like that, for a room 
where the lilies couldn’t be; or tufts and tangles of high brakes 
and ferns ; or flags, with the brown cat-tails. But those 
herons and storks and rhinoceroses ! ” 

“ Oh, how queer you are ! Chat and Bab and I always say 
so ! and I tell you they don’t come in any such styles. You 
must take what other people have. And there are never rhi- 
noceroses ! and we all think the herons are beautiful. So old- 
fashioned, you know, and in heraldry ! ” 

“ So are griffins — and goats — and unicorns — and spotted 
dogs. But not walking around the wainscots.” 

“ That ’s what I told you, and I should n’t want them if they 
were.” When, of course. Miss Ammah gave it up. 

They were all three at home, sitting in the library, when 

2 


18 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


France Everidge came in ; Chat and Bab, as usual, one with her 
palette and tile, and the other with her macrame cushion ; and 
Mag just returned and seated, with her bonnet-strings loosened, 
to tell what she had seen, what heard, and what adventured. 

“ I met Kennison,” she told them, “ and thought I ’d better 
make sure of him before the hurry came on ; so I engaged him 
to calcomania the spare bedroom.” 

“ Mag ! ” cried Bab imploringly, “ why caiiH you learn the 
difference 1 1 hope you said ‘ calcimine ’ to that man. And the 

other day you told Ellen Johues that we meant to have a par- 
quetrie floor laid in the little west hall ! What will people think! 
You are growing a perfect Mrs. Malaprop.” 

“ I don’t care, that ’s right, for I looked it out afterward. 
They’re both French ; one comes from the floor, ‘ parquet,’ and 
the other from the marking-off, ‘ marqueter ’ ; so if one is any 
more real and regular than the other, it ’s the floor itself, 
made of real pieces : the other might be painted ; and you 
need n’t have put your eyebrows into isosceles triangles at me, 
nor Ellen Johnes have got ‘ marquetrie ’ into her next sentence. 
I scorned to say a word ! ” 

Here France was shown in ; but presently Miss Mag went on 
again, addressing her news primarily, as she would have handed 
other refreshment, to their visitor. 

“And I met Miss Ammah out over the hill, — walking, 
way over to the Johneses. We all think she’s so queer, you 
know, don’t we 1 ” turning to Chat and Bab with the last 
words ; and Chat and Bab nodded, over paint-brush and bobbin. 

“ I asked her why she never came and stayed with us. What 
do you think she said 1 That we should never get at each other. 
Four minds all made up, she said, and characters settled. Too 
much lignum-vitse. What do you suppose she meant! Too 
much like four nine-pin balls, with nothing to knock down. 
I ’m sure we ’re always knocking down ! Never heard such a 
queer person. Said she liked best to go where there were young 
folks, — characters forming and coming out. She could get and 
give something. Wanted something ^fluent.' As if we were n’t 
fluent enough, — Chat and Bab and I ! ” 

“ Are the farmer people fluent up at Fellaiden ! ” put in Miss 
Bab. 


so QUEER ! 


19 


“That’s what I asked her, and she told me, ‘Very much so.’ 

0, you can’t possibly get anything out of Miss Ammah. 
Fluent /” 

“ Did you go to Mr. Brett’s, Mag 1 ” 

“Yes; and they’re coming Thursday. Hope the calcimine 
man won’t come too. But I haven ’t got through about Miss 
Ammah. I asked her if there were any young persons in Fel- 
laiden that she could get and give with. She said, ‘Yes, a few ; 
and that there would be one more this summer, for a young 
person had agreed to go up there with her. ’ Who on earth do 
you suppose 1 ” 

Miss Mag turned again toward France, but Frai\ce was not 
there. During this last speech, she had moved around to the 
elder sister’s side of the library-table, and was watching Miss 
Bab’s quick knotting of the soft gray twine. 

“ What heaps of things there are to do in the world ! ” she 
was saying, before Miss Mag had come to her question. “ And 
they are inventing new ones all the time. It ’s very discourag' 
ing to a conscientious person ! ” 

“ One has to be pretty busy,” said Miss Chat, putting a hard, 
dark, conventional line around the edge of a leaf in two flat 
shades of color, “ to keep up with ideas.” 

France was afraid to look at the tile, with the ragged branch 
thrust out from nowhere, in true art style, across one side, and 
the funereal bird, solid black with shadow, though sitting there 
in freest, unobstructed atmosphere. It was too funny ; and 
France amiably endeavored to keep the fun internal. 

“ I wonder,” she said, gravely and queerly, “ if it ’s meet, 
right, and our bounden duty to try to do it all 1 Because I ’m , 
all behindhand in negligences and ignorances if it is. And 
Clarence Cook and the art papers do make you feel as if they 
were a kind of law and gospel. — Did you hear Mr. Brett last 
Sunday, Miss Margaret 1 ” 

The obvious connecting link was law and gospel, and the 
quotation from the prayer-book. If there was another connec- 
tion, France kept it, and whatever earnestness it may have had, 
inwardly to herself, with her fun. 

“ Yes. I don’t know. I don’t remember particularly,” said 
Miss Mag. 


20 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


France did not preach it over again. She was not given to 
preaching or to quotation of sacred authority, except aslant, 
which might be taken, as well as not, for mere odd levity. But 
she was recalling something about the nearest commandment 
being the way of escape from the nearest temptation; and 
about being busy with God’s things being a safeguard against 
getting too busy with the things of the world. Under her non- 
sense and her oddity, France Everidge was unquestionably be- 
ginning to weigh and measure things in some rather perplexing 
ways. 

“ You like Mr. Brett U’ She put the question suddenly, with 
the consciousness of not caring to be asked herself about what 
the sermon had been. 

“ 0 yes. He ’s a good man and a good neighbor. But for a 
clergyman, — well, he ’s limited.” 

“ I suppose we can’t expect to get an unlimited good man.” 

“ France ! ” with a volume of emphasis and dropping inflec- 
tion on the vowel sound of the short name. “ You ’re as queer 
as Miss Ammah, every bit.” And Miss Ammah got one of the 
explosive falls upon the first “ A ” in her name. “ Queerest 
girl I ever saw in my life ! Wonder what you ’ll be at her age, 
if your character keeps coming out ! ” 

France laughed as she got up to go. This was not the way 
she had meant to put it in circulation, but she put it now, 
upon the impulse, as it came. 

“ Can’t tell about anything so far off,” she said ; “ but I ’m as 
likely as not to get farther on at present in the same way, since 
I ’m the young person that is going with her up to Fellaiden.” 

She spoke slowly, and she had got to the door while speak- 
ing ; she held the knob in her hand, and only paused to say 
good-by. Miss Mag was on her feet with surprise, making her 
way toward her, as if she would have had her back, and all the 
whys and hows out of her. 

“ My ! What for 1 Do tell us ! ” was all she could possibly 
say, falling into the proverbial commonplaces, as they first fell 
into speech. 

“ To run away from my neglected duties among the savages 
who have n’t got any. Good-by '. ” and France was off. 


so QUEER I 


21 


She walked slowly through the village, on the other side ot 
which from the Pyes’ Nest the Everidges lived. She met Mr. 
Brett walking down, and stopped to shake hands with him. 

“ Have you been as far as our house!” he asked kindly. 

“ Not to-day. I have only been to the Pyes’ Nest.” 

“ One of the pleasantest places to go to. How pretty they 
make it ! ” said the minister. 

France looked curiously, more than she was aware, into his 
eyes. Undoubtedly the minister was limited. He had preached 
a sermon last Sunday, grand with simple truth for simple liv- 
ing ; believing it and living it himself from his heart. How 
could he know, though, that within five minutes this girl had 
been comparing that teaching with Miss Chat’s painting of 
absurdities on china, and Miss Bab’s tying twine into knots 
and chains for table-fringe 1 How could he see that the curious 
look in her eyes was searching for something that would tell 
her how much of life was meant for porcelain and macram4 
lace! 

The Miss Pyes were among his friendliest parishioners ; he 
never judged personal judgments; he had had pleasant hours 
— and was freshly bidden to more — at the cottage, which, 
perhaps, he had a little scruple about smiling at under its 
popular name of the Pyes’ Nest, and praised the more unre- 
servedly in consequence, when France called it so. 

“ I suppose they do make it all the pleasanter for the Bretts, 
and for other people ; even the fun of it. I suppose there ’s 
some sort of a mission about it,” said France to herself, walk- 
ing up the hill. 


22 


ODD, OK EVEN V 


CHAPTER III. 

FARMYARD AND KITCHEN. 

Farmer Heybrook’s old brown mare came lungeing up the 
steep hill, pitch after pitch, from the deep hollow like a crater, 
in which, viewed from above, everything, going or coming, 
seemed to drop over and disappear, and thence to emerge at 
either side in almost perpendicular struggle, like a creature 
slipped into a pit-trap, and scrambling desperately for dear life, 
almost against possibility or expectation, out of it. 

Israel, the farmer’s son, was driving. You could see — that is, 
if you had been by Mother Heybrook’s side, you could have seen, 
from the low-roofed, wide piazza that embraced the southwest 
angle of the house, and from which rolled away, beneath, the 
hill-country landscape of three counties — his fresh straw hat 
showing bright in the sunlight against the rock-shadows, or 
between the young green boughs of the maples, as old Saltpetre 
tugged up to the top of one waterbar after another, and on 
each paused, with heaving sides, while the hat measured both 
halt and progress by its own stop, higher up to view, against 
point after point of the distance. 

Mother Heybrook watched eagerly till something more was 
visible, not quite so tall as the straw hat that shone bright in 
the sun. Arrived at a clearer opening and a more topping 
pitch, a red rose and a fluttering ribbon, shoulder-high to the 
hat, made themselves manifest. 

“ She ’s come ! Sarell ’s come ! and I ’m whole-footed for this 
summer ! ” said “ Ma’am ” joyfully to the farmer, sitting in his 
shirt-sleeves on the red settee-rocker. 

“ Expected her, did n’t ye 1 ” asked the farmer calmly. 

“ Well, yes ; but you can’t tell how things ’ll turn out, ’specially 
at Uncle Amb’s. I haven’t ever felt so sure of her. come 


FARMYARD AND KITCHEN. 23 

spring, since she took up there for the winter. ’Tain’t easy to 
get much of anything back from Uncle Amb’s, you know.” 

“ I know ; ye need n’t remind me,” said Farmer Heybrook. 
And he got up from the red rocker and went round to the front 
of the house, to meet Rael and take the mare off his hands. 
Rael was wanted to go after some stray cattle. Mrs. Heybrook 
came through the house to the front door. 

“ I ’m right down glad to see you, Sarell,” said the mistress, 
as the girl jumped, with clean aplomb, from the wagon-wheel to 
the broad doorstone. 

“And I’m np and down glad to get here,” answered the 
maid, with equal cordiality ; and the two women, hirer and 
hired, kissed each other, as friends between whom there was no 
difference. 

“Wasn’t any diffikilty about getting away?” asked Mrs. 
Heybrook, in Yankee form and abbreviation. 

“ Alwers diffikilty,” replied Miss Sarell Gately ; “ nothing ’s 
ever quite ready to come to the p’int up there. Mother Pem- 
ble ’s awful kicksy-wicksy, and Elviry did n’t scursely know 
how to spare me. Land ! I do hope I sha’n’t ever live to be an 
old rag-baby ! Never mind my box, Rael. I ’ll take it up 
myself.” 

The girl, fresh and lively, and very far from any likelihood 
of ever being an old rag-baby, perceptibly delighted in her 
freshness, and to show it, contrastingly to her words, before 
the face of the young man. The red rose in her hat-front 
marked, with flashing movements, her gay briskness of spirits, 
as she “ took the stage,” and felt herself the central interest in 
this moment of her arrival and welcome. 

“ Did you get any mail, Israel % ” 

“ I ’d almost forgot,” answered the young man, speaking for 
the first time, and putting his hand in the deep pocket of his 
loose summer coat, just as he had been turning away ; “ there ’s 
a letter from Miss Tredgold, and something, I guess, from 
Hawksbury way. Old Puttenham is always prompt.” 

“ And so ’s Miss Tredgold,” said his mother cheerily. “ One ’s 
a good set-off to the other, Rael.” 

Rael looked at her as if he thought the set-off, to most of the 


;>4 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


hindrances and hard rubs, was only secondarily through Miss 
Tredgold or anybody else. All he said was, seeing that Sarell 
had gone through to the kitchen for a look at old familiar cor- 
i^erg^ — “I’m glad you ’ve got your help, mother. Now be 
sure you let Sarell do things. I ’ll be back in an hour or so. 
Don’t hinder supper, I shall only want some bread and milk,” 
and in a moment more he was over the Great-Mowing wall, and 
going by the field-edge inside it, down under the brow of the 
beautiful land swell, toward the oak pastures beyond. 

Mrs. Heybrook took her letters into the sitting-room, and 
put on her spectacles, that lay on the top of her big work- 
basket. Sarell’s voice sounded already beyond, in a full, joy- 
ous rendering of “Hold the Fort,” and between the notes was 
audible the energetic clatter of dishes with which she was set- 
ting the family table in the cool out-room. She was taking her 
place and her work without preliminary, proud, with a pleasant 
ostentation, of her full familiarity with ways and things. 

“Hold the Fort,” sung through, gave place to “Only an 
Armor-bearer,” and the rafters rang, and the wide, open old 
farmhouse was full, all through, of the untutored music. Mrs. 
Heybrook’s exclamation of astonishment over the letter from 
Boston was lost in the tide of song, and the good lady hushed 
herself up, with a second thought, and did not repeat, or follow 
it with any announcement. “Time enough to-morrow,” she 
said to herself. “ I don’t believe Sarell ’ll more than half like it : 
and she ’s so high-spirited to-night ! ” and slie put the folded 
sheet into the envelope again, and that into her pocket, as she 
rose to set the Hawksbury letter, with her husband’s name 
upon the cover, behind the brass candlestick on the high 
mantel. 

Then she called Sarell, and led her through the house ; showed 
her the new frilled curtains in the best parlor, and the braided 
hall-mats she had made in the winter ; the new spreads, that 
she had “ pieced,” in the bedrooms, and the pink puff in Miss 
Tredgold’s room. 

“ Don’t seem as if you had left anything for me,” said Sarell. 

“0, this is all lezhure work. Now we’ve got to take hold 
together, in earnest, and make things go.” 


FARMYARD AND KITCHEN. 


25 


They went through kitchen, out-room, and butteries together; 
then out to the front porch and across to the barn ; Mrs. Hey- 
brook showing Sarell how the “ menfolks ” bad made everything 
neat as to their part, at odd jobs after the noon “ baitings,” and 
after sundowns, when the cows were milked and the chickens 
were in, and the pigs had got their supper, and the turkeys had 
been fed in the back dooryard, as bad to be done to “ wont ” 
them to coming home nights. 

The wide grass dooryard had been raked and cleaned of 
wind-blown branches; the wagons were tidily stowed in the 
sheds, leaving free the floor of the south barn, where Miss 
Tredgold liked to sit on a toss of hay, and enjoy the sweet air, 
and the picture of the hills framed in by the doors that opened 
out upon the great mowing ; and the little corner stairway was 
swept down that led to the lofts, where also she liked to make 
a still, luxurious retreat among the huge, fragrant cushions of 
the mow. 

“ We ’ve got the dooryard to sweep over, ourselves,” said 
Mrs. Heybrook, coming back with her companion toward the 
front porch. “ I never call it done till that ’s done ; then it ’s 
as fine as a carpet. We’ll take to it as we get chances; it’s 
all that ’s left to do, and they — Miss Tredgold won’t be here 
for a day or two yet. Thursday noon, probably, the .letter 
says.” 

Between the “ they ” that had slipped unaware from her lips 
and the finishing of her communication, Mrs. Heybrook had 
made a diversion of stepping aside to pick up a few gray 
turkey-feathers newly scattered on the clean sward. She might 
have been going to say anything with her “ they,” and Sarell 
did not connect it with the announcement concerning Miss 
Tredgold. 

“ Why not take right hold of it now 1 ” said the capable 
damsel. “ There ’s near an hour of daylight yet. I ’ll fetch 
the brooms. I know where you keep ’em.” .And Sarell was 
off", across the end stoop into the out-room, and back presently, 
with her dress pinned up high behind, and two good corn- 
brooms in her hands. 

So, while the distant mountain-tops turned all delicious rose- 


2t> 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


color, and then royal with purple mist, and then dusk with 
darkening gray, and the turkeys, roosting in long rows, shoved 
and fluttered in the elm-boughs, the farm wufe and the farm 
maiden brushed over the young, close-growing turf, till no 
beautiful lawn, cropped every day by a mower, could be fresher 
or daintier under foot, or half so much a piece of the real, 
generous, green world, as it spread out there in soft color and 
speckless distance over nearer and farther slopes, and all looked 
as if thrown open together, inviting the footsteps, — one free, 
clean-swept, beautiful carpet, flung in grand mile-breadths across 
intervales and over the heaving hills. 

The menfolks came in to the delayed supper ; and Sarell, 
her skirt shaken down again, and all rosy herself with exercise 
and gladness, waited on them with the milk-bowls and the 
great plates of bread, and pie-pieces and doughnuts, and the 
sage cheese, fresh cut from a huge creamy round ; and she was 
so gay that Mrs. Heybrook felt half mean at not telling her 
right off to-night, and wholly sure that it would be a shame 
to tell her anything that might throw a doubt or a disappoint- 
ment over the summer-time that was so cheerily and heartily 
beginning. 

For in her own heart it was a least bit of vexation to the 
good woman herself that a new, strange city boarder — a young- 
lady, boai’der — was to be added to the summer family ; and 
she was in no haste to say to anybody what Miss Tredgold 
said in the letter that was in her pocket, of the young friend, 
whom she only put into a postscript, and proposed to put into 
the northw^est bedroom, that opened, slightly partitioned, from 
her own, and was never otherwise used when she was at the 
farm. 

She felt a little consciousness of being “ worked ” in secret, — 
Mrs. Heybrook did, — and that this had added somewhat to 
the effervescence of her energy as she swept the dooryard so 
vigorously with Sarell, astonishing the boys, when they came 
up across the lot, with their smart beginning. Sarell, for her 
part, evidently enjoyed making nothing, before them, of this 
first taking up of her share of the labors that lay at her 
hand. 


FARMYARD AND KITCHEN. 


27 


“Don’t you ever think your day’s work done, mother?” 
Rael had asked. He was always takinj^ “ mother’s ” part 
against herself. 

And Lyman had said, as he shambled in his overgrown boy’s 
fashion, with long, strong limbs, across the yard-place past the 
women, “ They ’re a team, those two, mother and Sarell ! 
We ’re hitched up now for all summer ; and there ’ll be no 
grass growin’ under their heels ! ” 

Not elegant commendation; but Sarell was glad and proud 
of it, although it was only Lyme that said it. 

Mrs. Heybrook was thinking and wondering, then and 
through supper-time, how her boys, — bright fellows and 
academy-bred, and far enough from the traditional clodhopper- 
ism which real New England farm-life has long been rising 
away from, although Lyman did shamble with his long legs 
and say things more hill-flavored than society-toned, — how 
her boys would come and go in their shirt-sleeves, in the sweat 
of their manly labor, with brown faces and earth-stained hands, 
all summer through, before the dainty city girl, sitting in her 
muslin frocks to watch them, as she watched the cows coming 
home or lumbering off to pasture, or the awkward turkeys 
fluttering and shuffling into the great elm-boughs to roost. 
She did not know what a bucolic was, but she did not want her 
sons to act one three months long, for the entertainment or the 
passive observation of a woman of their own age, so brought 
up, probably, as to look on farmers and their bullocks as of one 
herd and nature. Yet she hoped the boys would come in at 
the front door if they wanted to. She would not have them 
take one roundabout turn to or from their work, or even put 
their coats on when they toiled up the steep west side-hill 
from the mowing, in full sight from the -cool piazza all the 
way. 

Moreover, she was exercised and “ put about ” in advance 
concerning her pantry, now that she knew the young lady 
was on the way. Would the veal roast suit her for a dinner, 
or ought there to be a fowl beside ? The white rooster came 
into her head, that night, after she had laid it on her pillow, and 
she waked Welcome to tell him that they must be sure to 


28 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


“ ketch and kill it some time next day,” Welcome’s grunt, as 
lie turned over, had conveyed more complex meaning than 
mere . assent. They had tried to catch and kill that white 
rooster before ; and next morning they were to begin hoeing 
the big south cornfield, half a mile down toward the river. 

Of Sarell, who meanwhile was sleeping deliciously on her 
springy bed of fresh, rustling corn-husks, in the little kitchen 
attic, with the end gable-window looking right out into a cloud of 
apple-blossoms between which twinkled the far, golden stars, 
and by whose low sill she had sat for half an hour before un- 
dressing, thinking how good it was to get back to Heybrook 
Farm for all summer, it may as well be said that, so far at 
any rate, there was nothing in her pleasure, or in what Mother 
Heybrook instinctively felt would be a damper upon it, that 
has to do with the ordinary mechanism of a novel, or the 
reader’s inevitable forecast of how things, according to all prece- 
dent, are going to befall. 

Sarell was not a bit in love with handsome Rael : she had 
good common-sense enough to know that it would be a hazard- 
ous investment of sentiment ; for Rael Heybrook was “ ’cademy 
learned,” and on the way, through all his rough country toil, 
to be in a profession some day, and a gentleman ; and thoiigh 
Sarell was indeed of too pure republican Yankee strain to 
allow that she wasn’t “good enough,” in a certain sense, for 
anybody or anywhere, she could feel that she had scarcely that 
rapport with Rael, or that relation to the Heybrook views in 
general, to make it a prudent thing for her to set her mind — 
or her hat with its “ rose enthroned ” — deliberately in that 
direction. None the less did she enjoy, in the frank, pleasant, 
hearty life of the farmhouse, being the one young w'oman in it ; 
having for a brief season the representation, in her own person, 
of all that was freshly feminine, bright, smart, housewifely, 
capable, and important there. A woman always likes to 
show a man what may be for somebody, though she have 
neither wish nor hope that it may be for him. She enjoyed 
the importance of her arrival ; the complete at-homeness wdiich 
she reassumed at once, as we have seen, in the w’ell-ordered, 
well-to-do establishment. She had a pretty part to play, all 


FARMYARD AND KITCHEN. 


29 


summer long, in her blithe, buxom way, among them. And 
she undoubtedly would have liked it as it had been before, to 
herself ; unshorn of precedence by any other and different 
young ladyhood, unimpaired by comparison with another and 
very diffei'ent style. She was, undoubtedly, pleased with the 
sense of being free herself, and in companionship with a bright 
young person of the other sex, whom she liked genially and 
healthily, and who was free also. Some day, perhaps, when — 
who knows? — she might have made up her mind to certain 
other contingencies which had begun to loom already elsewhere, 
she might hear with calmness that Israel Heybrook had found 
and chosen, when she was not at hand, some nice girl for a 
wife ; but she w'ould have no pleasure in standing by at the 
choosing. Not, either, that all this ultimation would be in her 
mind as anywise probable from the advent of a young-lady 
city boarder at the farm. It would only be some stranger in 
the “ first young-lady part ” and place ; and she had not “ taken 
the stage ” to give way in the second scene to that. 

So wise Mrs. Heybrook let her have her welcome and her 
little flourish all to herself, and go off to bed to-night, uncon- 
scious. It would be better to-morrow, perhaps, that she had 
so installed her, and could then bring forward, as a secondary 
point, the fact reserved. 

The first practical thing, next morning, and that which 
would bring out incidentally, perhaps, the announcement to 
Sarell, was the catching of the white rooster. Mrs. Heybrook, 
after Sarell had gone up-stairs last night, had told Rael — 
standing with him in the cool back porch a minute, as the 
* mother loved to do with her boy when the last work was over — 
the import of Miss Tredgold’s letter. The old farmer heard it 
in the brief, safe interval betw'een the dropping of his head 
upon the pillow and the dropping of himself into dreams. No 
chance, then, for any more lengthened objection than a grunt ; 
and afterward, if he wanted to object, which Welcome Heybrook 
never did want to do if he could help it, he would have to 
begin the subject again on purpose himself. 

All Israel said to the news was, “ Well, it ’s your business, 
mother. If it ’s satisfactory to you, nothing else matters.” 


30 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


But her feminine clairvoyance detected the undertone of re 
Btraint, and she remembered again the field labors and the hot 
days, the dust and the sweat of the brows, the shirt-sleeves and 
the coarse trousers, and the coming up the hill at the nooning. 
I doubt if Israel thought of one of these things. 

While, in the early morning, “mother” was putting up the 
dinner-pails that were to be taken to the far field-work that 
day, the farmer was fain to submit to the housewifely edict, 
and make one more raid after that veritable outlaw and guerilla, 
the white rooster. * 

Israel, the tall, blond-haired, sober-faced fellow, wearing his 
old sun-scorched straw hat in his princely way over the tossed 
locks, deferred also to his mother’s will, and strode gravely 
around the yard-place, heading the bird which his father, with 
stoop and “ shoo ” and arms outspread, drove fluttering from 
one side to the other. Lyman, the boy of eighteen, tickled with 
the fun and the mischief, laughed and shouted and slyly bore 
the hunt over toward the barn. Mrs. Heybrook stood before 
the porch, and called nervously, — 

“ He’ll be over the wall into the gardiu’ ! Look out, Rael ! 
He ’ll get under the barn. Don’t you dare to let him, Lyman 
Heybrook! Father! keep this way more, and Rael ’ll have 
him ! ” 

Father kept this way, Lyman made a rush, the white rooster 
flew screaming over Israel’s shoulder, and the next minute, 
scrambling to ground in a cloud of dust and feathers, scuttled 
tumultuously under the sill of the barn and disappeared. 

“ Well, you are smart menfolks, — three of you ! ” ejaculated 
Mother Heybrook, laughing too, with all her might, as she was 
apt to do if ever she tried to scold. “ You ’ve done it now. 
You won’t get him this time, and you may as well clear off to 
your hoeing. Lyman, let alone poking ! you need n’t pertend . 
he ’s just where you meant he should be.” 

But Lyman went into the barn, and took down his gun. He 
was n’t going to lose the excuse for a shot. 

“ That ’s what you wanted, is it 1 Why could n’t you shoot 
him flying, then 1 0 you goose ! Stop ! how ’ll you get him out 
again when he is shot 1 ” 


FARMYARD AND KITCHEN. 


'61 


The guu went off at the same moment that Israel, at her 
elbow, said quietly, “ He don’t mean to kill him, mother. 
He ’ll only scare him out the other side.” 

But nothing came out the other side. The rooster was either 
dead or “ portending.” Now they had lost a good half hour. 
Mother Heybrook said, “ Well, it don’t signify so terrible much, 
to-day.. But you get him to-night or to-morrow. She’ll 
have to make out with the veal, first time.” 

“ She ] which 1 ” asked Israel, stopping with his hoe over his 
shoulder. Somehow, the two words, with the interrogation 
after each, carried whole volumes of exception to his mother’s 
unaccustomed worry and the evident exciting cause. 

“ Why, the young one, of course. I know what ’ll satisfy 
Miss Tredgold.” 

“ Don’t let that young woman give you double work or 
double thinking, all summer, mother,” Israel said, with kind 
authority, looking straight into her eyes. 

Women like to be commanded for kindness’ sake, and espe- 
cially does a mother, by her grown-up son. “ He ’s a good 
boy,” Mrs. Heybrook spoke aloud, to herself, as she turned in 
at the porchway, “ if he did n't ketch the rooster. And he 
would if it had n’t been for that Lyme, too.” The twinkle in 
her eye told that she was proud of “ that Lyme ” and of his 
pranks, also. 

Sarell was washing dishes at the kitchen sink. The window 
over it looked straight forth, through twists of grapevines, upon 
the scene of action. It was a marvellous lightener, in double 
sense, that summer window, to the homely toil. Sarell was au 
courant, and as good as participant, in all the comings and 
goings and small excitements of the house-yard. She clattered 
her dishes like cymbals of triumph, by no means loth or failing 
30 to sound forth her achieving smartness ; and her laugh rang 
out high and hearty at the white rooster’s clumsy but success- 
ful tactics, and the menfolks’ discomfiture. 

“ See,” Mrs. Heybrook said, meditatively, coming in, “ to- 
day ’s Wednesday. That cretur ought to be kep’ over a day, 
certain, or he’ll be as tough as Gibraltar. I’d have had a 
chicken-pie of him to-morrow, if they ’d only made out to get 


32 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


him. But we’ll boil him, with a nice dish of greens, Friday. 
Miss Tredgold ’s great for early greens, and the young one ’ll 
like my butter-cream sauce, I ’ll engage. Well, they must n’t 
chase him under the barn again, that ’s all ; and, too, the un- 
derpinnin* of that barn ought to be seen to ; the hens steal their 
nests there, and everything. It ’s a regular trap.” 

“ I could ’a got that rooster. Mis’ Heybrook,” said capable 
Sarell. “ And I ’ll have him yet, before them three is back 
again, if you won’t let on. But who ’s the young one % ” 

“ I did n’t know there was any, myself, till last night ; and I 
thought I would n’t say anything just then,” answered Mrs. 
Heybrook, breaking it gently, even now. “ She ’s coming up 
with Miss Tredgold, and she ’ll have the little northwest bed- 
room. I donno ’s she ’ll make much diflfer’nce, but ’t was n’t 
what I was thinking of. Perhaps that’s just as well, though ; 
for I might n’t have thought favorable, and I should n’t like to 
refuse Miss Tredgold, neither.” 

“ 0, well,” answered Sarell encouragingly, “ perhaps she ’s 
old enough not to be under foot everywhere ; and I presume 
she ’s been learnt how to behave.” 

“ Land’s sake, Sarell ! she ’s a young lady ! Under foot ! 
She ’s more likely to be way up overhead — of all our ways. 
That ’s what I ’m most afraid of. These young folks have n’t 
got the consideration of women like Miss Tredgold.” 

Mother Heybrook bad done it now. She had chased her 
rooster under the barn. So, like Lyme, she made haste to fire 
a shot after him. “ But there ! what ’s the use of borrowin’ 
trouble! An’ I don’t. It don’t amount to anything, any way; 
and Miss Tredgold is considerate, and she knows what she ’s 
about. She would n’t bring anybody that would be higbflown 
or diffikilt.” 

If the newcomer should be “ highflown or difl&kilt ” enough 
to keep quite out of Sarell’s own sphere and ways, — that is, out 
of the sphere and ways of the whole Heybrook household, — 
probably the country maiden might not care, or be disturbed. 
The slight shade that crossed her cheerful face at the hearing 
was not the forecast of something that was to be quite high and 
distant, but rather of something that might come down near 


FARMYARD AND KITCHEN. 


33 


enough to get between her and her sunlight. But Sarell was 
not of the sort that borrows trouble, either ; and she scorned tc 
show a jealousy or disturbance, 

“ I presume she ’s learnt how to behave,” she reiterated, 
changing only from the passive to the active form of the verb. 
The phrase, she thought, applied otherwise as well to nineteen 
as to nine. 

Mrs. Heybrook laughed. “ It ’s hard getting round you, Sarell,” 
• she said. “ Now if you can only get round that white rooster.” 

And the two women went out for a reconnoissance, and to 
construct a plan of campaign. It was a good diversion frort 
the summer-boarder subject. Sarell was queen in the farm- 
yard, and in the kitchen among the household regalia; her 
mopstick was sceptre, her fresh working apron, with bib and 
strap, was ribbon and order : none could divest or depose her. 
I: :^ermost is highest ; behind the scenes is place and privilege ; 
every shop-girl knows that, dealing sublimely across her coun- 
ter with the canaille of purchasers. No mere “ boarder” could 
interfere with Sarell in her established centrality, or get the 
better of her from the outside line. She felt it, and reassured 
herself, going forth with high intent to get the better of the 
menfolks. 

The menfolks — the “ three of ’em,” as they were always 
numerically reproached when a chore waited or a horse or fowl 
evaded — came back to the hunt at night, having already kept 
a searching lookout through the da3’^-iritervals, at the nooning, 
and in errands to the house or barns. But no rooster was 
forthcoming, even to roost. 

Rael wondered, and peered into corn-barn and mangers and 
shed-corners, as he went about, in his usual sedate way, with 
the feeding of the creatures and the letting in and milking of 
the cows that stood at the head of the lane, looking over 
wall and barplace into their yard. Lyme ransacked loft and 
granary', and shied stones into the darkness under the big barn. 
The old farmer kept up a general survey of earth and air, wan- 
dering around the premises on the “ expectant system,” ready 
to pounce upon the first symptom of emergence anywhere, but 
lost in the wide maze of possibilities in which the “ clear tor- 

8 


34 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


ment ” had taken refuge. At least five times he had looked 
hopelessly into the kitchen, to tell “ ma’am ” and Sarell that it 
was “ onaccountable, and kept gittin’ more so.” 

“ Of course he ’s somewhere," said Sarell, with merciless en- 
couragement. 

“It’s most too bad,” mother would w^hisper; especially re- 
lentful when Rael came in with the milk, and said it was too 
bad for her to be disappointed, but it seemed as if the old fel- 
low either really had been shot, or had got clear away off the 
farm altogether. But still she did not “ let on ” or let up. 

“ Of course he ’s shot,” said Lyme, reporting in his tura. 
“ That little rifle of mine knows its way like a fetcher dog.” 

“ Then how do you expect to get him 1 ” asked his mother, 
hardened again by the boy’s conceit. 

It lasted till dark, and it began again in the morning.-* Tt 
was an exciting interest now : the true spirit of the chas' uihh 
up ; and “ menfolks ” will spend a whole day in chasing a rat, 
if once that aboriginal instinct takes possession. 

Lyme was up at daylight, rushing and diving about like a 
baffled hound ; the others came later and quietei*, but were at 
it for a good half hour before they called Lyman off, — as if he 
alone represented the boy element among them, — and all w’ent 
afield for their “ sunrise spell.” 

At breakfast the women were ominously silent, as if the fun 
were pretty well over for them, and the difficulties of the larder 
remained solemnly to be met. The “ three of ’em ” went off, 
puzzled, reluctant, half exasperated and half sheepish at their 
failure. 

Then Sarell and the mother had their laugh out ; and the 
mother laughed till she cried, which was not all from the laugh- 
ing either. Those three great farmer fellows had been so 
persevering and so patient, after all ! But Sarell was only one- 
and-twenty. She had not begun yet to have too much compas- 
sion on the menfolks. 

It seemed to me to be well that you should have this intro- 
ductory glimpse of the Heybrooks by themselves, before the 
summer boarders came, and the little piece of the history of 
France, that I have taken in hand to write about, began. 


POLITE TO A BUTTERFLY. 


35 


CHAPTER IV. 

POLITE TO A BUTTERFLY. 

It was chill among the mountains the next morning after 
Miss Ammah and France had come. There was a great fog 
slowly rolling down between the hills from north to south, 
hanging above the distant river course. That was a sign of 
bright weather presently. When the fog rolled up, rain came. 

Miss Ammah went out into the kitchen after breakfast, to 
warm her slippered feet at Mrs. Heybrook’s shining stove. 
France stood in the doorway, not yet quite free of the penetra- 
lia, like Miss Ammah. Something of a savory smell was boiling 
and steaming deliciously over the fire. Israel Heybrook was 
just beyond in the stoop, whence a low window opened over the 
kitchen dresser, putting some small repair to a farm tool. Mi-s. 
Heybrook called to him. 

“ How is it about that rooster, Raell” 

“ Well, mother, it ’s a kind of ridiculous thing, but I guess 
we ’ll have to give him up. Unless Lyme hit him and he ’s 
dead under the bam, there don’t seem to be any track of him.” 

“You ’re sure you looked everywhere last night 1” 

“Yes, ma’am, everywhere that was probable.” 

“ And this morning 1 ” 

“This morning Lyme has been hunting everywhere that 
was improbable. Father says we must take up some boards of 
the barn floor. It won’t do to leave him there.” 

Rael was standing with his back half turned against the 
window. He could not see the energetic winks his mother 
gave Miss Tredgold, nor that lady’s vain efforts to look grave 
and unconcerned. 

“Do you think you would know him if you saw him, Raell” 

“What do you mean, mother! What’s up!” 


36 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


“ Look here.” 

Rael leaned in at the window and looked. Mrs. Heybrook 
lifted the cover of the big pot, and thrust her meat-fork in. 

“Is that anything like himl” and she held up, dripping and 
steaming, the clean-dressed, half-cooked body of a fowl, wdngs 
and legs neatly skewered and tied down. “ He won’t fly off 
over your shoulder this time, Rael.” 

“ Did he fly in there 1 ” asked cool Rael. 

“ No, sir ! It took the women, — Sarell and I. We drove him 
into the bam.” 

Lyman came in through the shed, looking for the tool. “ Not 
done yet, Rael 1 ” he began, in a wondering way. “ What ’r ye 
after!” Then he caught his mother’s words across his own, 
glanced in over Israel’s shoulder, and took in the situation. 
“Wahl,” he articulated, affecting his slowest Yankee drawl, that 
he knew perfectly w'ell to do without, “ we air done then, 
— rooster ’n all. When did it take place. Mis’ Heybrook ! ” 

“Yesterday momin’, jest after the doctor give him up and 
went away.” 

Lyman was a natural practitioner for any ailing live-stock on 
the farm, and had a strong idea of a medical profession, so he 
was already brevetted “ doctor ” in home speech. 

“ And we hunting him all noontime an’ after sundown, as 
long as we could n’t see ! I guess I ’d as good go stop father 
tearing up the whole barn floor. Mis’ Heybrook, you ’re a mas- 
terpiece ! ” 

“That’s the w'ay my boys take a joke,” said Mrs. Heybrook 
proudly, as the two marched off. 

Some suggestions like these rose unexpressed through France 
Everidge’s mind, as she looked on, diverted, at the little 
scene ; — 

“ Not elegant banter ; a homely joke enough ; but how bright 
and good-natured they are ! I wonder if the main thing in it 
is n’t as good human as the politest clever chaff! And how 
handsome that grave, proud Israel is ! ” 

On his part, Israel never once looked at the doorway oppo- 
site his window, where the girl’s figure stood against the farther 
light, complete in prettiness, from the high-puffed hair to the 


POLITE TO A BUTTERFLY. 


37 


fluted ruffle of the morning-dress under which the shoe-tips hid 
and peeped. Perhaps there w-as just a suffix to France’s thought 
as she walked away in her own direction : “ Nice-mannered to 
his mother. I wonder he has n’t a little more manner, or 
notice, or something, for other people ! ” 

That night, just after sundown, she looked from her north- 
west window at the red-gold of the sky, through the maple 
leaves. The great boughs reached across to the lintel, over the 
wide, low piazza-roof. An idea came to her mind. In a minute 
she and a big, puffy chair-cushion were out upon the shingles. 
She put the cushion down at the very eaves, where, seating 
herself, she could almost lean against the huge round trunk 
that reared up straight beside her. “ I ’ll sit here every day,” 
she said in her mind, gazing delightedly through the wonderful 
fret of the leafy lattice to the golden, gleaming distance, as into 
the very chamber of the sun. Everything else was framed 
out ; this only, in. 

But sound was not framed out. Rael and his mother came 
into the piazza beneath. The milking and the milk-straining 
were over, and their day’s work was done. Lyman and Miss 
Ammah had driven to the village for the mail. 

“ It ain’t a going to cross you, is it, Rael, having this young 
lady here 1 ” 

“Mel No, indeed. What is it to mel It crosses me if 
yoic 're to be put about. I don’t want to see you waiting aiid 
fetching for a girl.” 

“ Is that it 1 ” and Mrs. Heybrook’s tone lifted so that you 
could hear in it how her face lifted. “ I thought you seemed 
shy of her, — as if it was going to be kind of awkward for you, 
maybe.” Mrs. Heybrook slurred the second “w” slightly in the 
“awkward”; but we won’t be particular about that. 

Israel laughed out. “Awkward for me, mother 1 I don’t 
mind her any more than I would a butterfly on a mullein-stalk ! ” 

Mrs. Heybrook laughed too. “ Then we won’t go on worry- 
ing about each other,” she said. “ It ’s no put-about to me, and 
you need n’t think it. I like to see something young round ; a 
girl, you know.” And a sigh came gently with the laugh, for 


38 ODD, OR EVEN ? 

there had been only one sister for her boys, and she had died a 
baby. 

“ I think you might be a little polite to her, Kael. She may 
get homesick. And I don't think she ’s stuck up, — not a 
mite.” 

“ Have n’t I been polite ? Well, there has n’t been much 
time yet, has there 1 ” 

How thankful France was to hear Miss Ammah alighting 
from the chaise upon the far end of the piazza ! She had not 
dared to move, to walk over those crisp-sounding shingles to her 
window again. She was tingling with anger against herself for 
her literal, involuntary eavesdropping. In the bustle of Miss 
Ammah’s walking up underneath, and their mingled voices, she 
crept back into her room. 

But would she “sit there every day”? And should Mr. 
Israel Heybrook be “polite” to her? She thought an em- 
phatic negative to both questions. 

She busied herself about her room, finishing some of her 
unpacking which she had intended to leave till the morning. 
She chose to be busy when Miss Ammah came up to put away 
some heavy wrap and take a light shawl from her closet. 

Miss Ammah said the sunset was lovely among the hills, 
from the piazza; but France had been enjoying it, and had 
these things to make tidy now, and thought she should go to 
bed early to-night, and watch the sunset from the roof-window. 
Then a little compunction seized her at leaving her elderly 
friend so, this first established evening, and she added, with a 
very sweet quickness, — “if you don’t mind, dear Miss 
Ammah ? ” 

“Why should I, child? We can’t get far out of each other’s 
company up here, any more than in a ship at sea. And there ’s 
Mother Heybrook expecting her good long talk, to-night. Settle 
yourself, and go to sleep as the light goes. I often watch it out 
so, over the hills, and the very next wink I ’m conscious of, it’s 
streaking in again from the east room, across the hall.” 

On Saturday, they went over the oak pasture into the upland 
woodlot, taking their luncheon with them ; and in the sweets 
breathing solitude, among the ferns and the great tree-shadows, 


POLITE TO A BUTTERFLY. 


39 


France forgot what sort of link there was for her between this 
and any world of people. It was just enough for her that this 
one day had been made, — right here, and in such fashion, — 
and that she was living it. It might have been one of the first 
days, when there was only the evening and the morning, and 
the word of the Lord in them ; and the human story in the 
earth, with the daily complication and the news of it, had not 
begun to be. 

It was not till the next morning — Sunday — that there 
came occasion for any real contact of her living with that of the 
farm people ; any question of where her place should be, and 
how she should take it. 

She was dressed for church, whither she had assented to 
going, of course, and had not asked how, with Miss Ammah; 
and she was sitting ready, in a fresh, pretty, summer costume, 
by Miss Ammah’s window, while that lady tied her bonnet and 
put on her black lace shawl. 

Two vehicles came down from the barn to the dooryard, over 
the gi’ass sward that crept close to the threshold. 

“ Country residences ” set the country otf at arm’s length, 
with their gravelled drives and turnways, and their stately 
porte-cocheres. Farmhouses sit right down in the midst of 
beauty, and let it cling close and sweet. They displace noth- 
ing that a house can help displacing. 

France was delighted at the noiseless wheeling up over 
this soft outside carpet. It was so Sunday-like and still ; to 
day, especially, with all the rest of the blessed silences. 

One carriage was an ancient, rusty, one-seated, farmer’s open 
wagon, to which old Saltpetre was harnessed. When they 
went down stairs at Mother Heybrook’s summons, it appeared 
that the good lady herself was to drive this, Miss Tredgold 
accompanying. The other was a sufficiently plain, but modern 
buggy, open also, drawn by the “ colt,” who was twelve years 
old. Saltpetre being eighteen. France found that she was to be 
taken on this, with Israel for her driver. Of course she made 
sign neither of notice or objection. It was her first opportunity 
for letting, or not letting, Mr. Israel Heybrook be “ polite.” 

Israel kept her dress from the wheel as he handed her in, 


40 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


and spread a checked duster across her lap when she was 
seated, as quietly and nicely as any young Bostonian of the 
third hill could have done ; then he silently took his place by 
her side. 

France took the thing as a matter of course ; said “ Thank 
you,” as a matter of course ; and for five minutes after, as they 
slowly climbed one steep ridge after another of the long ascend- 
ing road said nothing, also as a matter of course. 

Israel could keep his peace without feeling it in his feet or 
his elbows. He held the reins without a fidget, his broad, 
handsome, sunburnt hand resting, gloveless, upon his knee. 
France, after they had attained the third ridgepole, felt the 
stiffness, and that it was her place to break it. 

“ How far is it to the Centre 1 ” she inquired. 

“ A long mile,” Israel answered. 

Then they rode on and said nothing for three ridgepoles more. 

“ Don’t your horses ever refuse these tremendous pitches 1 ” 
France asked now. 

“ It would be something like refusing their existence,” he 
replied ; and a quiet smile just showed the edges of some 
splendid teeth. “ They don’t know anything but hills. Are 
you afraid 1 ” 

This was a long speech, longer than she had asked for. She 
was certainly letting him get too polite. She simply said 
“ No,” and it ended again. 

I suppose she would not have spoken further until she said 
“Thank you” at the church door as he handed her out, except that 
she forgot for the instant he was there to speak to when, at the 
topmost brow of all, they turned and bore around upon a long 
crest line, whence the road wound downward presently toward 
the depth of a glorious basin, whose green slopes rose from its 
vast round on every side in beautiful, gradual swells of farm, 
fields, and woodland, and she caught the sudden sight of all this, 
and of the little centre village, with its white spire lifting into 
the sun. 

“ Oh ! ” she cried, with a lingering exclamation, and half ris- 
ing to her feet. “ It is like Jerusalem ! ” 

“ I ’ve thought of that,” said Israel. “ Have you been to 
Jerusalem 1 ” 


POLITE TO A BUTTEPwFLY. 


41 


He asked it as innocently as might be ; he did not suppose 
that anything was far or difficult or unlikely to these rich city 
people, who spent all their summers in travelling one whither 
or another. 

She was a little provoked, as if she thought he might be 
laughing at her. 

“ No,” she said shortly, “ I ’ve never flitted that far.” And 
she settled slightly farther toward the comer in her seat. She 
remembered, as indeed she had not been able to forget, the 
“butterfly.” But Israel did not remember it at all, and she 
would not have dared to make her words really reminding. 
The little spitefulness was all for her own indulgence. 

“ Our minister has been through all the Bible countries,” 
Israel volunteered, really trying, perhaps, to be pleasant and 
polite to this stranger in his own hill-country. “ We have got 
a pretty unusual man for a country church. He came here for 
his health, partly.” 

France said nothing to this, and the talk quite dropped. 

At the meeting-house steps, France might or might not have 
been conscious of the little rustic gathering and its glances of 
curiosity, — rustic gatherings do not stare open-mouthed in these 
days, — as the handsomest young farmer and “ likeliest ” man 
of all the region round about composedly helped her, the pretty, 
stylish young city stranger, down over the wagon-wheel. 

She accepted his assistance with corresponding unconscious 
coolness, and walked quietly in after Mother Heybrook and Miss 
Ammah, who had alighted just before her, while the old farmer 
and Rael led the horses to the sheds. 

When these two came in, in their turn, to the family pew, 
France, having taken her seat below the two elder ladies, 
found Rael next her again, which also she took wdth absolute 
unnoticing ; as much so as the fact of his mother being at her 
left. 

It fell to her to share a hymn-book with him, standing up 
during the singing. Now no Fellaiden girl would have done 
that without a pink flush or an odylic thrill in the fingers that 
held her side of the cover. France Everidge’s utterly quiet face 
and serene eyes looked forward with the simplest listening in 


42 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


them ; and the close of her glove-tips upon the book -corner nei- 
ther hesitated or shifted, except as she raised her thumb and let 
it fall again when Israel turned the leaf. There were eyes in the 
pews behind them that were watching all this, and saw nothing 
but the bearing of a lady, — something a shade finer in its re- 
pose, perhaps, than ordinarily perfected itself in Fellaiden, 
but which had nothing whatever to do, apparently, with any 
girl-consciousness, either pleased or displeased. Still less did 
it betray to the Heybrooks themselves that which was neverthe- 
less the consciousness of the unconsciousness, the determination 
in it, — a little hurt and proud, — to be neither “ stuck up ” nor 
accessible, but just no more to him or his politeness than he had 
said ; alighted near him, but of her own errand and happening 
merely, as it migiit be with the butterfly. 

The minister was “ unusual.’’ His sermon to-day was upon 
Paul, the Hebrew of the Hebrews. It fitted on curiously to 
the suggestion that had come to France and Israel by the way. 

It spoke of how “ Hebrew ” meant “ from beyond the Eu- 
phrates 3 ” from beyond the separating river that runs between 
the country of the men that know not God and the country of 
God’s children; of the divine idea — the Abraham — that first 
comes over, promised and seeking ; of all the typical history ; 
of the abiding in “ the land ” ; the straying into Egypt ; the 
leading back through the desert ; the conquering and the sin- 
ning ; the defeat and the going aw'ay into captivity, yes, even 
to the very borders again of the great river, into the edges of 
the old idolatry. Of Mankind the Hebrew, made for coming 
over from ignorance into light, crossing continually some new 
Euphrates ; of the “ Hebrews of the Hebrews,” taught deeper 
and deeper, from beyond and still from that beyond to another, 
passover after passover. Of how God calls, how He chooses ; 
a nation from nations, a man from men ; yes, ourselves from 
ourselves, until he makes up, first in eveiy one, and at last of 
all in one grand body, his new Jerusalem, that descendeth from 
Him out of heaven. And how that is the restoration, the coming 
back of the Jews, and the eternal rebuilding, and the tabernacle of 
God with men. But how, before that can be, there shall be the 
loosing of the avenging angels of the revelation, “ bound ” in 


POLITE TO A BUTTERFLY. 


43 


that “ great river, the river Euphrates,” — in all that separates 
and hinders from the coming into the kingdom, — to slay, and 
slay, and slay, with fire, and with smoke, and with brimstone. 

When France and Israel reached the crest-curve of the great 
hill again on their way home, but not before, France spoke. 
“ I think that was a grand sermon,” she said. 

It belonged to her, the stranger, to say it of Israel Hey- 
brook’s minister. She forgot, too, her pretty pique for the in- 
stant, in the great things they had been hearing. But Israel 
only quietly inclined his head for answer. Perhaps he, also, 
in the great things, forgot his purpose to “ be polite.” 

There was enough to think of going down the pitches, where 
the colt doubled himself up with holding back ; and before them 
was the glory of the vast hill region, wave beyond wave, melting 
at last, in faint blue outlines, into the blue, faint also, of the 
sun-filled sky. 

France made no other attempt at conversation ; when she 
sprang from the buggy upon the doorstone, she sprang at once 
away from whatever slight beginning she had made of an ac- 
quaintance with her companion. The butterfly was off the 
mullein-stalk. For days afterward it happened somehow that 
the girl never lit or lingered where Israel was, long enough to 
be looked at or spoken to. As for him, he never even “ minded ” 
that the mullein-stalk was empty. Perhaps, however, that last 
depends iipon how far you go into the mind to find the minding. 
Perhaps Israel himself did not go far enough. If he had, he 
might have detected a little soliloquizing voice away back there, 
saying, rather persistently, “ What difference does it make to 
me?” 


44 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


CHAPTER V. 

HIDE AND GO SEEK. 

Now, when a young woman takes some care to keep herself 
out of a young man’s daily way, and the young man is saying to 
himself what difference is it to him, their spheres, or atmo- 
spheres, are making, I fancy, some fine, delicate tangent of in- 
terest, — an interest that is often, as here, altogether due in its 
inception to some little kink of accidental reason, or unreason, 
for not allowing any possibility of interest at all. It might 
easily have been that these two should have come and gone in 
each other’s sight all summer without more sense of concern- 
ing each other than a butterfly and — any noble, useful crea- 
ture of different kind that you may choose ; I cannot compare 
my Rael in such wise, distinct and different as his life and habit 
so far may have been from those of France. But those chance 
words had moved, in each of them, some question that would 
keep looking for an answer now ; besides which, who can tell, 
even 1 for they were not butterfly and that other thing ; they 
were human creatures ; and so it was because of the very un- 
likeness between them in all outward place and accident that 
the human — yes, the male and feminine — in them, could bin 
be drawn, perhaps, curiously at least, toward some thought and 
study of each other. What was queer about it now was the 
fact that, secretly studying the other, each was making most 
gratuitous efforts to hide from the other the actual self, under 
an exaggeration of the differing circumstances. 

Israel wore coarser and rustier leather boots than he had any 
need to wear, and he hunted out, on some pretence of broader 
brim, the very brokefiest and blackenedest old straw hat that 
had ever seen a haymaking. On the other hand, France, who 
hated the bother of much dressing, and had rejoiced over the 


HIDE AND GO SEEK. 


45 


prospect of “ living in a sacque,” got up the most careful of 
toilets, and sat, as useless-looking as she could, under the great 
elm canopy before the door, or on the piazza ; always flitting if 
Israel came near, or resting on her mullein-stalk with the 
serenity of a winged thing that knows she can lift herself in- 
stantly into the unreachable air if a coarse touch approaches. 

And here was a yet queerer thing : that, through the whole, 
each quite clearly detected that the other was hiding, though 
both thought themselves effectually hid. 

“ He makes himself as horridly common as he can, because 
he supposes 1 ’ra not capable of understanding his uncommon- 
ness.” 

“ She gets behind all that extra niceness because I ’m not fit 
to be let see her as she is.” 

So that the queerest thing of the whole was brought to pass : 
that they were, in their wise notions of their own aspects in 
each other’s minds, quite perfectly hidden from each other after 
all. 

Sometimes, fresh from the field, straw hat in hand, and hair 
rumpled back, damp and curly, from his forehead, Israel would 
sit down on a piazza-chair or step, or on the doorstone, near 
Miss Aramah, finding her alone ; and France would hear from 
within, or see, coming homeward from a walk, that they were 
talking cosily and easily together, and she was angry in her 
heart that this young man, to whom she never gave the 
slenderest opportunity, did not care to say a word to her ; while 
he, listening for her step, or watching the far-off shine and 
flutter of her garments in the sun, would rise as soon as she 
came near and walk away, leaving her to her place and her 
better right. 

“ What does he find to talk about to you. Miss Ammah 1 ” she 
asked very carelessly one day, when she came in with an armful 
of ferns, and could not bear it any longer. 

“Oh, everything. All his plans. I ’ve known him and all 
of them, you know, these five years.” 

“ Has he got plans!” she inquired indifferently ; as indifferently 
as she handled a great plumy cluster of superb, locust-like 
fronds, raising in her fingers the bit of root from which the 


46 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


grouped stems sprang till she looked upward through its branchy 
forest and leafy cloud, yet seeming scarcely to notice that she 
looked up or that a lovely w'onder was above her eyes. She 
might have been questioning whether one fine creation more 
than another could plan or change for itself, up here in these 
woods, other than to grow on just where it had been put. 

“ Of course he has, or had, and has now, — but different. 
He wanted to be an engineer. You ’ve seen his books about.” 

“ Those physics and mechanics, — Ganot and the Calculus, 
and things 1 Are those hisl ” 

“ Why, don’t you know they are 1 I saw you take one up 
yesterday, and it opened at the name in the fly-leaf.” 

“Did it 1” 

“ France Everidge, I believe you ’re looking the wrong way to 
see Rael Heybrook, or anything that belongs to him. You 
need n’t undei’take to look down.” 

“ Do 1 1 ” persisted the girl lazily. 

“ Why do you bristle all over so with interrogation points 1 
You are a positive porciipine.” 

“ Am II I trust that before I get away from Fellaiden it 
may be settled what order of natural history I belong to. I 
thought I was papilionaceous.” 

Miss Ammah gave her a keen glance ; then she went back 
quietly to the beginning of the subject. 

“ He has had two terms in Boston at the Technological, and 
he meant to have worked his way abroad to study in the German 
schools. But his father went and upset it all by signing some- 
thing ever so long ago, when Rael was learning his multiplica- 
tion table, — a bond for somebody ; and after it was all forgotten 
it went wrong, and came down upon him when Rael was just home 
for his second summer. And then there had to be a mortgage 
put upon the farm, and these boys have got to work it off. 
Lyman will have to be a doctor finally ; it ’s in him, and 
there ’ll be suffering somewhere without the help that w^as 
made for it, Rael says, if it does n’t come to use ; besides, 
there ’s longer time for Lyman. Israel is twenty-three, and he 
could n’t get away these two or three years yet, and so he has 
made up his mind to take up wdth the farm and see the old 


HIDE AND GO SEEK. 


47 


folks through. But he doesn’t give up his reading either. 
The truth of things is all the same, he says, and it ’s just as 
good to find it.” 

“ It is very good of him.” 

“ Good 1 It ’s magnificent ! ” 

France got up, left all her load of pretty green lying on the 
settee where she had thrown it, and walked into the house with 
her one Royal Osmunda — anonymous to her, for she did not 
know ferns scientifically — in her hand. She went up to her 
room, set it in a tall blue-gray jar, and poured fresh water to 
it. She, stood and looked at it a minute ; turned it so that it 
rested more stately in its place, perfect in its every fair and 
manifold division. 

“ That is the sort of thing, then, that comes to life here, wild, 
among the fields ; and I never saw it until now, and do not 
know it by name when I do see it.” 

She said it to herself more exactly than she reckoned : she 
saw the royal thing plain enough ; she did not know by name, 
by place, or by the character that it had already taken with 
those who did know, — either the man or the cryptogam. She 
began to resent, confusedly, that she had been kept out of 
knowing. 


48 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


CHAPTER VI. 

HAY-SWATHS AND HIGH COURTESY. 

After these days France Everidge tired, apparently, of that 
which she had pretended to bring here and put in contrast with 
sweet and vigorous realities. She tired of her separateness and 
her niceness ; she walked oftener into the woods and down by 
the brookside ; she made friends with Lyman, for she could talk 
with this boy ; and she folded away her butterfly wings quite 
invisibly, finding it only worth while to be and to wear, from 
morning to night, that which left her freest to make part of the 
primal, delicious, busy life that earth and its creatures were 
living about her. 

Lyman liked her. He was pleased when she came to the 
edge of his ploughed field, and stood there waiting with a ques- 
tion or a comradely word for him, till he got to the end of his 
furrow with his cultivator. He made odd half-hours of leisure, 
to go with her and show her where the maiden-hair grew, knee- 
deep in a green sea of beauty. He was the one now, nearly 
always, to drive her to church on the Sundays. Rael walked : 
two of the menfolks must always do that ; and the sturdy old 
farmer could trudge over the hill as well as his boys, and 
thought, somehow, that one of the boys, new-suited with tailor’s 
clothes, was fittest to drive the girl. 

It happened one Monday, when the early haying was begun, 
that France, her breath and blood high stimulated with the 
oxygen of the hills in the clearest of hill mornings, flung down 
work or book with sudden impulse, and went off swiftly down 
the north mowing, where Lyman’s machine, stridulous like a 
host of locusts, was making that “ noise like a flame of fire that 
devoureth the stubble,” and the air was fragrant with the dying 
breath of the falling grasses. 

She stood and watched him along the lower swath, then up 


HAY-SWATHS AND HIGH COUKTESY. 


49 


toward her over the tslope and along the upper margin of the 
great slope again, the stems dropping in a broad, even sweep 
beside his wheels, until he reached her, and stopped his team iu 
the mid-line to speak to her. 

“ It ’s like a war-chariot,” she said. “ They contrived that 
three or four thousand years ago, to mow down men. I wonder 
they never thought of it for grass before.” 

“Too busy their own way, maybe, counting ‘all flesh as 
grass,’ ” said Lyman, getting off, and taking occasion to clear 
the guards. “ They have n’t beat all their spears into pruning- 
hooks yet, I presume.” 

“ I wish I could ride there,” said France. “ Could I, for one 
round, do you think ? Could you lead ? ” 

“ Of course,” said Lyman ; “ ride all day if you want to.” 
And he put her up, with great glee, into the iron-framed seat. 

“ 0, it is perfectly lovely ! ” cried France, as the colt and Salt- 
petre started up again, and the whirr of the wheels and the click 
of the knives and the soft swish of the dropping stems began 
again. “ I think I shall stay here all day.” She folded her 
hands in her lap, and sat, like a Boadicea of the sweet millennium, * 
riding down the gentle host of the herbage, consenting, with 
praiseful incense-breath, to be gathered to its use. 

“ What is that girl about ? ” cried Miss Ammah, coming upon 
the piazza in time to see her finishing her second round. 

Some one else, at the same moment, was crossing the low 
wall from the roadway into the mowing, — Israel, hoe on 
shoulder, on his way from the turnip to the bean field. Just 
as they both saw her, the girl crouched down sidewise, giving 
a scream. “ Stop, Lyman ! Oh, I ’m caught ! ” she called out. 

Lyman laughed, with one breath : he thought she meant she 
was discovered ; with the next, when he had half turned his 
head, he shouted a tremendous “ Whoa ! ” to his horses. The 
girl’s gown was drawn into the cogs of the gearing-wheels : she 
was crouching down because she was being pulled down. 
Another revolution or two, and she might have been thrown 
before those hungry, clicking knives. 

He had hardly reached her side, before Israel, flinging down 
his hoe, had run with great leaps to the horses’ heads. 

4 


50 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


“ They ’ll stand,” said Lyman, with easy drawl. 

“ It is n’t going to be left to them,” Kael answered quickly. 

“ All right ! You hold on there,” Lyman rejoined, half chok- 
ing with fun, now, between France’s dilemma and his brother’s 
unwonted haste and heat, since he felt matters secure in his 
own hands. 

Secure enough, but with some question : should he cut away 
the fabric in great tatters, or should he wait to unscrew the 
gearing 1 Meanwhile she was sitting there, frightened and 
ashamed, and painfully cramped in her forced position. 

“Could you unfasten a belt or something 1” he asked, the 
gentleman in him keeping uppermost with tolerable gravity, 
but the boy dying underneath with drollery. 

“ No, never mind ! Tear it out, — cut it, — anyhow,” 
France said impatiently, tied fast there to her own foolishness. 

“ There ’s a lot of it,” said Lyman, unclasping his knife. 
“ I don’t see how it all got in.” 

Rael patted the horses’ noses, — kept his head the other side 
of theirs, — and neither interfered nor noticed further. 

When France, released with the loss of a square half-yard of 
her dress-skirt, and with a grievous ruin beneath that in her 
gay blue balmoral, sprang from the carriage above, he passed 
around it below, came up from behind on the whole side of her, 
and walked with her up the hill. 

Miss Tredgold was hurrying down. 

France clutched her disarray fearlessly together with her 
right hand, and grew cool ; feeling a most unspeakable acknowl- 
edgment within her to the farmer-fellow’s quick good sense. 
If he were anywhere else in that big hay-field now, but just 
exactly where he was, how could she walk up over its crown, 
and not remember that his eyes might be following her in her 
absurd demolishment 1 That they would be, she did not believe 
at all, any more than we believe in the possible lurker in our 
dark rooms at midnight ; yet she would have quivered at it, all 
the same, as we do. She was thankful, too, for a delay : there 
could be an ordinary word, now, to tone away that ridiculous 
impression of her which it was good he had not gone right off 
with, and which she never could have meddled with again, to 
try to mend. 


HAY-SWATHS AND HIGH COURTESY. 51 

“ I hope I have not hindered your brother awfully. Will it 
break the machine ? ” 

“ Oh, no ! that ’s all right by this time.” 

“ It was lovely up there,” she said composedly ; “just sail- 
ing along over the tips of the grass- heads, and seeing them slip 
down before the scythe.” 

“ There is n’t a prettier thing I know of than to ride a mow- 
ing-machine a day like this,” said Rael. “ I ’m glad you tried 
it ; but Lyme should have taken better care. There was no 
need of any trouble.” 

How nice it was he said a “ prettier thing ” ! He might have 
said “a jollier thing,” or “better fun,” which would not have 
let her off at all ; but “ prettier ” was girlish, was ladylike ; as 
if girls rode, or might ride, mowing-machines every day. 

She could have counted the words she had ever exchanged 
with him thus far ; she could have counted the words she had 
heard spoken of him : but she had learned of him beyond 
words already; she had learned a secret of nobleness, that 
was a key and a certainty for all his acts. This fine tact was 
but the large generosity moving upon minuter things, like 
the magnetism that keeps the earth-axis steadfast among the 
stars, and turns the tremble of the needle just as surely to its 
parallel. 

Gentlemen, trained in courtesy from the time they could 
take their little hats off to make a bow, she had been among 
all her days. A simple man, in whom all courtesy showed it- 
self just because it was and had to be, was like the beauty of 
noble hills after the measured prettiness of parks. 

One of these gentlemen, a man making his mark now in the 
world, and with a good deal, really, to mark with, had approached 
her with such opportunity as he could get to approach a “ mid- 
dle sister ” in a family of society like the Everidges. The elder 
ones counted him among their own availabilities : France knew 
very well what she could do if she chose. But this gentleman 
had quite forgotten something that France remembered with a 
tingle and a flash whenever she saw or thought of him. She 
had done a silly little thing, as girls of fourteen will, once ; and 
this man, a youth then, full of sufficiency and conceit, had 


52 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


quenched her for it. It was only that she had crossed a room, 
where a young party was assembled, with a certain trippingness, 
affected just then as a fashion among her schoolmates. It was 
prettier in a schoolroom, at recess, than in a drawing-room, in 
the edge of grown-up dignities. Very possibly it had not been 
adopted into drawing-rooms, or within that edge of dignity which 
is always just removed from the little catch-airs or the catch- 
words of the day. However that may be, our youth had presently 
after to cross the same space ; and he had shortened and quickened 
his steps, and poised his elbows, in the slightest possible parody of 
hers. Nobody noticed it, perhaps, to trace the motive, but herself ; 
her little performance might have been but one of many that pro- 
voked his ridicule as the girls’ nonsense of that day ; but that 
man might rise — or sink — through the whole grade of Ameri- 
can public preferment, and she would never see him but as a 
pert youngster, mincing across a parlor carpet to pain and 
shame the harmless, passing folly of a little girl. 

Mrs. Everidge was keeping Frances back, now, like other 
mothers of many daughters ; but it had occurred to her com- 
fortably that there was a way for her to go forward, one of these 
days, whenever she herself might judiciously allow. France 
would have gone back into pinafores and learned all her way 
up again, certain enough to skip the flit-step when she came to 
it, sooner than forgive the mocking, and trust her possible re- 
maining weaknesses to the mercy of the man who mocked. 

But even this farmer had called her a butterfly. Had he, 
though? We know that he was finding less a likening for her 
than for his own indifference when he said it. Was it the 
indifference that made it stay by her so sorely? Not in the 
ordinaiy, personal way of girls looking insatiately and every- 
where for personal admiration ; but the woman in her, that 
always wants to stand representative of a worthy, beautiful 
womanhood to man, hated to be put by in such fashion and 
under such a type. And she kept thinking all through her 
swift-forming respects for him, “ He does not believe me capa- 
ble of comprehending.” 

Rael turned off when Miss Tredgold came to them, and struck 
obliquely from them, forward, toward the upper barns. He 


HAY-SWATHS AND HIGH COURTESY. 


53 


knew he had forgotten his hoe, down there in the grass ; but 
he just kept on and got another. He was feeling, scarcely 
saying, to himself, “ She was a lady through the whole of it. 
How pure and pretty her enjoyment was ; and how quietly she 
gave out that it was that, and not a romp ! But she thinks I 
can’t reach up to her ladyhood ; she is careful not to take me 
on a level. Lyme may do ; he ’s only a boy ; she can be com- 
rades with him : she would have to make something like a 
friend of me, and she can’t do that.” 

So they fell back into their old distances again. 


54 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


CHAPTER VII. 

SARELL AND EAST HOLLOW. 

Sarell was going over to Hawksbury to spend a Sunday. She 
had had the promise of doing this once or twice in the season, 
as part of her summer bargain. She had one married sister 
living in Hawksbury, and another here, just this side of Fellai- 
den Centre. Sarell had these two households a good deal on 
her mind; besides which, there were affairs at Uncle Amb’s, 
where she had “hired out” two winters, and where certain 
matters, that she did not want to lose the thread of, had linked 
themselves in her knowledge and interest, with her life and 
knowledge elsewhere, as we may come to see. 

Sarell was a young woman to take up responsibilities as she 
went along. She liked them. She became naturally a part of 
whatever was happening in her Troy ; and wherever her tempor- 
ary Troy might be, there was pretty sure to be something happen- 
ing. That, however, is true of all times and places ; even under a 
burdock leaf or a stone is a whole world of event and action, 
any hour of a summer’s day : the difference is in there being a 
looker-on, and a looker-on who is also a looker-in. 

Sarell saw into things ; she prided herself on that ; and she 
could put things together. So that it fell in her way, as she 
said, “ ’most always,” if she “ picked up one piece, one time’,” 
to “ pick up what it fitted on to, next.” “ If ’t was an odd 
stocking to-day, it was the mate to it to-morrow.” 

As she moved back and forth, in her alternations of duty 
and concern, between Hawksbury and Fellaiden, and Uncle 
Amb’s farm, that lay on the east line, just out of Sudley, car- 
rying that “ thread of things ” and its responsibility with her, 
she made lines and connections, like the lace-work that grounds 
in and joins the pattern-figures of a web ; since she never forgot 


SARELL AND EAST HOLLOW. 


55 


or failed to tie her knot where she saw a join ought to be, or 
where she could put forth a finger to make it. 

Sarell knew very well the history of which Miss Ammah had 
given only the outline, without names, to France Everidge. 

She knew old Puttenham held the mortgage on the Hey- 
brook farm, the interest on which the farmer had to pay up 
on quarter-days. She knew about Uncle Amb’s bond that 
Farmer Hey brook signed, and had had to come down with the 
money for ; and ever since she had known and understood that, 
she had been endeavoring to know and understand the secret of 
the “chastised meekness” of Deacon Ambrose’s ostensible 
poverty, and the evident straightforward betterment and sure 
productiveness of his acres ; also to reconcile, or confront, the 
same idea of poverty and resignation with the sharp, watching 
look in Mother Pemble’s restless gray eyes, — the only part of 
her, except her hands, supposed to be capable of restlessness, 
in her bedridden helplessness of now some seven years’ dura- 
tion, — as they followed the deacon to and fro, or sent glances 
of a corkscrew sort of penetration into the very air, to pursue, 
as it were, the hidden twist there might be in his words which 
the air dispersed, at the times when he got pinned down, in 
spite of himself, by her bedside, to answer cross-examinative 
questions concerning plans, affairs, and results at the home- 
stead. 

“ ’Tain’t fer nothin’ she lays there, watching Uncle Amb’ an’ 
the big seckerterry,” shrewd Sarell said to herself. For the 
big secretary could no more be moved from the “ east settin’- 
room ” than Mother Pemble herself, who had chosen and 
claimed that room of all the rooms in the house to be bed- 
ridden in. 

Mother Pemble had the right ; for when “ Care’^iW,” her 
daughter, married Ambrose Newell, twenty years before, 
Mother Pemble made over to her all the little property that 
Josiah, her husband, had left for them both ; upon the making 
over to his wife, on the deacon’s part, of the homestead farm, 
and to herself the written promise that she should have her 
board and maintenance from them, and the occupancy of such 
single room as she should elect in the dwelling-house. 


56 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


Fond of money and control as Mrs. Pemble was known to be, 
everybody was surprised at the exchange of her independent 
means for this equivalent of maintenance. But Ambrose Newell 
was thought a thriving and a saving man in those days, and 
Mother Pemble had no one to think of but GaxQ'line, who alone 
stood — as a child sometimes does, just better than nothing 
— between her soul and the perdition of utter selfish covetous- 
ness. For her, and to secure what she thought greater things 
for her future, she would do anything ; and some tangible con- 
sideration, she had clearly seen, must help weigh down the 
scale of Ambrose Newell’s inclination at the critical moment 
of its balance. This she put forth in the making known of 
what her plan would be, “ if Care’line should marry, and take 
up with a home of her own.” It had been as shx'ewdly led up 
to by Ambrose, in his friendly, tentative inquiry, of “ how she 
would ever take it if Care’line should talk of settin’ up in life 
like other folks ? ” 

“I’d give up all I ’ve got to her, an’ she might take care of 
me,” said the widow, a stout, capable body herself, twelve years 
younger than the deacon, which made their prospective rela- 
tionship sufificiently absurd ; quite as likely — and the deacon 
could take that into account — to lighten as to make care, for 
the next twenty years. “ I ’ve saved and spared fer Care’line ; 
an’ she may hev it. She won’t begrudge me a comer, an’ what 
I can eat an’ put on ; an’ I ’ve got good store of most things fer 
clothing, fer my lifetime.” 

So Ambrose pushed his good bargain ; got his second wife, 
thirty years younger than himself, with a fresh face and bright, 
pretty, country ways ; got his homestead and farm secured from 
all mishap to himself by that generous settling upon her ; got 
also a “ likely ” mother-in-law to help look after pantry and dairy ; 
while their two thousand dollars and their piece of land merged 
themselves in the working of the farm and in his speculations ; 
for even up here, in the primitive hills, there were speculations 
for those who could get “ forehanded ” enough to enter into 
them. 

There was a company in Hawksbury for the opening of a 
quarry, and the making of a bit of railroad to join the main line, 


SARELL AND EAST HOLLOW. 


57 


for transportation. Ambrose Newell went into this, and became 
a man of shares and mythical money-making . Care’line and 
her mother held their heads high, riding in and out of Hawks- 
bury with him on his “ business days.” 

All went on flourishingly, as appeared, for some years; the 
farm, Care’line’s, turned in well in crops and stock ; the farmer 
sold and invested. This was all personal, and his own affair : 
nobody knew exactly what he did with it, but the deacon was 
looked up to with deference, as a man who had money put by, 
until, at last, a crisis came, to which, forever after, could be 
referred all non-forthcoming of whatever he might have been 
believed possessed of. 

Some new stone, that came rapidly into favor, began to dis- 
place the syenite of Powder Hill, and make riches for new men, 
down nearer the building markets. Dividends lessened, inter- 
mitted from season to season, then failed altogether ; and at last 
there came a business day when the deacon’s face looked black 
as he drove home alone from Hawksbury, having grimly refused 
the jaunt to his womenfolks when they had talked of it the 
night before. And in a few weeks the works at the quarry 
stopped ; the affairs were to be wound up, which simply meant 
that the stockholders were to be apprised that there was 
nothing represented any longer by their certificates, unless 
they could come and take it out of the hornblende slate in 
Powder Hill ; and that such of them as bad other property were 
liable for their proportion of the last six months’ debt for labor 
expenses at the works. 

But this was not all as regarded Deacon Newell. He had 
held a certain trust in his hands, not large, as larger men 
would count it, but of essential importance to all concerned ; 
and for this it was that Farmer Heybrook had put his name to 
bonds for his half-brother, long ago, and then forgotten all 
about it. 

Nothing transpired, in connection with the other losses, at 
the time. Whatever load of his own Uncle Amb had to carry, 
and however he made it out, after the abandonment of the 
Hawksbury quarries, the interest of the trust got paid ; but 
when in course of years the life-estate for which he held it 


68 ODD, OR EVEN? 

terminated, and the principal had to be forthcoming, there was 
nothing to show. 

Not that he spread out empty and defaulting hands to the 
/ittle world of Hawksbury and Fellaiden ; he did not tell it to 
the church ; he reversed the application of the New Testament 
precept, and first told his own delinquency, or as he expressed 
it, his “ unfort’nitness,” to his half-brother, to see what help or 
mercy he should find in him. 

What the alternative might have been if Welcome Hey brook 
had taken him up roughly, I will not undertake to say; I do 
not pretend to know more than Welcome and his neighbors 
could find out ; and nobody knew much of Uncle Amb’s ways 
and means, any more in their restriction than they had done in 
their expansion. 

Welcome turned pretty white for a minute, when the news 
came upon him ; then he asked, “ Have n’t you got anything 
to settle it with 1 ” 

“ Well, not of any accaount ; I jest make out to scratch along, 
you see. I could raise two or three hunderds, maybe.” And 
his eye sought Welcome’s with a sharp, quick, sidewise glance 
that took itself back again before Heybrook met it. 

Welcome Heybrook was as simple as a child. When Am- 
brose said, in bis chastised way, “ You k’n let it all aout, if you 
want to. I ’ve bin dreadful unfort’nit, and I can’t say a word ; 
but I don’t see as ’twould do either you or me a mite o’ good,” 
Welcome took upon his gentle, whole-brotherly heart all the 
burden of the other’s fault, and the fear that followed it ; and 
seeing, also, that no good could come, or evil be saved, to his 
own by any other course, since his written name would hold 
him liable for all the forfeiture, he just said, — 

“ I s’pose you ’ll try to pay me by degrees. It ’s a bad job 
for my boys — ” and then could n’t talk any more about it. 

Uncle Amb said, “Certain, certain; he should pay it all 
up, ef he was prospered.” And I am disposed to believe he 
meant it, in a dim, prospective way, when it should come easy 
to him; and that, at the moment, he really might not have 
been able to count out the ready dollars, having no farm of his 
own to mortgage, only a life interest, so to speak, in what he had 


SARELL AND EAST HOLLOW. 


69 


made over years before to his young wife. Perhaps, also, that 
“ ef he was prospered ” was a slant retainer upon Providence, — 
the Providence that “ doth not suffer the righteous to be 
moved,” — and that Uncle Amb, according to his dusky lights, 
believed in. It was a lien upon all the promises through this 
righteous brother, since it was clear that he should not come to 
confusion, and equally clear that it must depend, instrumen- 
tally, upon what should be given, through himself, to save him. 
It would even seem — or may seem to us, as we follow the 
story — that he was loth to relinquish this security, and dis- 
charge the account with Providence by the liquidation of the 
full claims of Welcome Heybrook. What difference did it make, 
so long as the farm did n’t actually have to go 1 And he did n’t 
mean to let it come to that pass, as a matter of course. But 
this anticipates. 

The Heybrook farm, then, was mortgaged, and Deacon New- 
ell’s trust was rendered up without exposure ; and each three 
months Welcome had to humble himself to ask his own of 
Ambrose in help, merely to meet the interest. And while the 
deacon “ scratched along,” and things looked as comfortable as 
ever at the East Hollow, everybody knew that somehow, notwith- 
standing clearer chances, and what all confessed to be first-rate 
good work, there was something that had run down hill with 
what ought to have been the profits of our friends at the West 
Side. Some laid it to the account of their ambitious education 
of their boys ; and some guessed that it might date back to the 
deacon’s first difficulties, when so much got buried up in the 
forsaken, grass-grown ledges. It was all in the family, and the 
Heybrooks were whist folks about their concerns always. 

The deacon had no children. There had been two by the 
first marriage, but both died in early childhood. Care’line never 
had any. An illness, however, when, as matrons say, she was 
“disappointed,” had been like the money disappointments of 
Uncle Amb, — an event to date all disabilities from ; for, though 
stout of figure and florid of complexion, Care’line never got her 
full strength again from that time ; and her strength, as re- 
garded its application to domestic labors, had not been before 
altogether as her day was, — in fact, the day had not been her 


60 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


day, which precisely makes the difference. She had never taken 
it to herself, or troubled herself much about it. The old lady, 
as a country dowager is always called, though, like Mother 
Pemble, still on the forenoon side of fifty, had done the work, 
and vigilantly “ seen to things.” 

But by some most mysterious visitation, and even more mys- 
terious acquiescence, considering her will and motive. Mother 
Pemble, some seven years ago, had broken down. 

Elviry Scovel was hired in to help, and became a fixture. In 
busy times — haymaking, harvesting, and “ sugarin’ off” — a sec- 
ond assistant had to be called in ; and people commiserated the 
deacon for the incompetency of his own womenfolks, and won- 
dered how he ever got along with all he had to provide for. 

That he did get along — “ wonderful, certin, considerin’ his af- 
flictions ” — was allowed on all sides. The deacon himself never 
complained, except so far as to say to Welcome on interest days, 
that it “was tollable hard, hevin’ to kerry both ends,” and that 
he “ s’posed it was all for the best, but it did seem as if the luck 
did n’t get sorted in this world ; at least, it was allers prevty 
much one kind that come to his house.” 

It did not look, certainly, as if the main debt to the Hey- 
brooks were likely to be repaid. 

It was usually Sarell Gately who filled the extra needs at 
East Hollow for spring and fall work ; she, for some reason of 
her own, would come for very “ reasonable ” pay, which meant, 
as we have all, perhaps, noticed^ on the one side of such reckon- 
ing, something rather below reason in regard of cheapness. 

Care’line and Elviry “ laid it to the score ” of Hollis Bassett, 
the “hired boy,” whose boyhood had reached the count of 
some fifteen hayings and harvestings since he first began to 
handle a rake, or gather apples into barrels in the deacon’s Long 
Brook orchard. 

Hollis was a handsome fellow, in a sunburnt, country fashion, 
with a kind of rollicking sauciness in his Yankee speech, and an 
ease and unconstraint in the rustic bearing that had never been 
rebuked into awkwardness, that were “taking with the women.” 
But he was fonder of fishing than of hoeing, and would wasto 
half a day after a woodchuck when he was supposed to be busy 


SARELL AND EAST HOLLOW. 


61 


with chopping or piling in the wood-lot. Then on Sundays he 
would wear fine store-clothes, and come into church with his 
wavy brown hair redolent of bergamot, leaving a hired “ team ” 
in the shed outside, in which he would invite the favored girl of 
the day to ride with him after the two services were over, round 
into Reade or Hawksbury or Wakeslow, or over by the pond 
or the ledges in the sunset. 

There was only Sarell Gately, of all the girls in Fellaiden, 
who never seemed to care for these serenely secure askings of 
his ; who never lingered in his way upon the church steps or 
green, and who had even, now and again, refused the public 
pride and felicity of being handed in to the seat by his side. 
Perhaps the pride of turning quietly away homeward had been 
the greater. However, Sarell was always willing, except when 
promised or employed at the Hey brooks’, to come to Uncle 
Arab’s for a spell of work ; and Hollis would fetch her to and 
fro, or she would let him come for her at the West Side farm 
for her trips into Hawksbury. There was the difference of being 
waited on for a real service, at her own need and pleasure, and 
that of waiting his pleasure for a favor common to every good- 
looking girl in the three parishes. 

Sarell knew quite well what was worth while, and what was 
better missed than made. 

It was Hollis Bassett who stood this Saturday evening on the 
front doorstone at the Heybrooks’, holding the trim lines of his 
“ livery team.” He had on a bran new wide-awake and a brown 
linen duster, and had got himself up with a knowing pair of driv- 
ing-gloves ; but Rael Heybrook passed him with a nod whose 
mere civility was aggravating, and Mother Heybrook, through 
the parlor blinds, looked out at him with a face in which an 
anxious doubt predominated. 

Sarell came in to see by the parlor glass that her overdress 
was bunched up right and that her whole effect was self cred- 
itable. 

Mrs. Heybrook turned up a green leaf that had got twisted 
beside the red rose in the hat-brim. She took the moment to 
say softly, “ It ain’t my business, Sarell, but I ’m a kind of 
mother to you, you know ; and his looks may misrepperseiit him. 


62 ODD, OR EVEN? 

but I donH half feel he ’s to be calculated on for anything real 
substantial.” 

The tone was interrogative in its deprecatory gentleness of 
suggestion ; and Sarell looked back at her with something just 
a little less smart and off-hand than usual in her air, though 
she answered, “ He ’s all right, Mrs. Heybrook, thank you. I 
know just what he is good for, and just where to keep him. 
If I did n’t take him in hand a little, he would be spoiled ; and 
’t would be a pity he should be throwed away.” 

“ She talks as if he was preserves or pickles,” said good Mrs. 
Heybrook to herself. “ An’, too, I s’pose a man is better worth 
saving, if it don’t waste the sugar it ’s done with,” she added, 
walking off meditatively to her quiet, cool kitchen, which was 
all done up, and waiting for Sunday. 


I 


GOOD AT A HOLD-BACK. 


63 


CHAPTER VIII. 

GOOD AT A HOLD-BACK. 

All the girls iu Fellaiden, except Sarell, and a good many 
of the older women were more or less overawed by the outside pre- 
sentment of Hollis Bassett. They thought he was “ real smart,” 
a notch above the ordinary measure of men about their country 
neighborhood. He talked high and large to everybody but 
Sarell, to whom he ventured the same things with a certain 
cringe of self-distrust and bespeaking of support or even tolera- 
tion, about future intentions. He was n’t always going to hire 
out on a farm ; no, nor farm it anyway. Some time, and before 
long, he meant to get into “ mercantyle ” life, buying and sell- 
ing ; that was the work for him. There was a chance for trade, 
now, in Wakeslow. He had got an idea when he was down to 
Boston ; and whenever he could lay by a little something that 
he could call capital, he meant to show ’em how. 

All this, and a good deal more, asserted with that fine, free, 
confident air of his, impressed his ordinary hearers as brilliant 
in enterprise and wisdom. It was only Sarell whom he could 
not impress ; because he failed to be impressed with himself in 
her presence. 

Her penetration, her judgment — and he felt it — went straight 
down through all this style of his to the actual capacity under- 
neath ; and her sentence, pronounced in blunt vernacular, cut 
through to the quick of his own common sense, which, after all, 
underlay his fine pretension. For she was not even misled the 
other way by his small, transient flashiness; she knew that, 
though the “ smartness ” was a fiction, and his ambition in clothes 
and talk a folly, the man could do a man’s work if he were kept 
at it, and that hLs would-be knowingness was the most childish 
innocent affectation in the world. “ If she did not take him in 


64 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


hand, he would be spoiled.” This was the secret of her interest, 
so far as Hollis Bassett himself was concerned. That there 
was other matter and motive which had caused her so to study 
and possess herself of his character, will directly and without 
prolonged mystery appear. 

“ I was over to Wakeslow, yesterday,” remarked Mr. Bassett, 
as they came safely down the last crooked pitch of the Hey- 
brook Hill into Clark’s Hollow. “ The old man had some hay 
to send in. I did n’t more ’n half like my errand. ’T was a 
mixed lot, as uzhal. The corner loft was swep, over into the 
little bay, afore the new loads were all in. Deacon Amb’s an 
underwater old fellow, that ’s a fact.” 

Sarell’s face lit up ; not that she was “ rejoicing in the ini- 
quity,” and “ underwater ’’-ness ; only that somehow, when 
Hollis Bassett gave himself a chance, and let his own straight- 
forwardness, or such plain power as he did possess, appear, it 
gave her an instant sense of comfortable corroboration in her 
mind. 

The next sentences were not so satisfying, however. 

“ I talked a little with Goodsum ; cautious, you know. He ’s 
got a hundred, from his last teaming. He’d put in, fast 
enough. And that little house of Maxon’s is finished, and he ’s 
in. The corner room ’s a beauty, winders both ways, and the 
door and the steps between. I don’t see what you ’re set 
against it for. ’T would jest wake up Wakeslow.” 

“ For a week, maybe. How long do you s’pose ’t would take 
to collect all the dollar-bills that’s layin’ round loose, out 
there 1” Sarell spoke with supreme contempt. 

“ 0, I ’ve been thinkin’, since I talked it over to you before.” 
He did not say “ with you ” : it w-as a careful distinction for 
Hollis. “ Come to, I would n’t make it a dollar-store, nor 
yet a ninety-nine-cent one. Wakeslow and I ’d be a good deal 
of a muchness, about supply and demand, I guess. I ’d make 
it f forty — nine — cent one ! ” He announced his grand idea with 
long hyphens, and in italics. “ Nobody ’s tried that, anywhere, 
I don’t believe. It would jest tell ! ” 

“ I ’d make it nineteen, if I was you,” sa^d Sarell, without 
the least enthusiasm, “ or nine. Any little boy can play 


GOOD AT A HOLD-BACK. 65 

shop,” she added. “ I presume you ’ll get your money back. 
But I don’t know about rent. That ain’t play.” 

Hollis gave his horse a flick with his whip, and then drew 
him up suddenly, as he plunged rather unceremoniously over a 
water-bar. 

“ You ’re good at a hold-back,” he said to his companion, 
borrowing the severe irony of his rejoinder from the circum- 
stance of the moment. 

“ It ’s a good thing, going down hill,” remarked Sarell se- 
renely. “ I alwers think the britchin ’s the best part of the 
harness.” 

“ "VYell, then, what would you do, Sarell Gately 1 ” after a 
pause. 

“ I ’d be as perlite as I could,” said Miss Gately, coolly 
crushing him in his tenderest pretension. “ An’ then I ’d stay 
where I knew I was some use, an’ safe, fer a while, an’ if I 
wanted to keep store one of these days, I ’d Tceep store.” There 
were barrels and bales in her enunciation and emphasis ; they 
made Hollis Bassett feel as small as one of his own forty-nine- 
cent packages. 

But he held his chin up presently again, — a handsome chin, 
with a soft dark beard about it. “ I should like my wife,” he 
said with some magnificence, and carefully shunning the clip- 
ping of his words, “ to live in a village, amongst folks ; in a 
white house with green blinds, and my name on a door-plate.” 

“ Well, I hope she will, if you want her to,” said Miss Gately, 
with perfect presence of mind ; “ only I don’t believe the way 
to it would be by a forty-nine-cent store.” 

Nevertheless, the picture had not been without its effect 
upon her farm-bred imagination ; and it was with a little less 
superiority that she diverted the conversation with the inquiry, 
“How’s Mother Peinble these times'?” and then added, 
with significance, “ There ’s more responsibility over there to 
East Holler than you mistrust, Hollis ; there ought to be one 
honest man about the place, an’ a clear-headed one, for all 
folks’ sakes.” 

Hollis wondered in his secret mind what on earth she meant. 
But a man never lets a snrewd woman get the apparent start 

6 


66 ODD, OR EVEN? 

of him. At least he never thinks he does ; he answers in a 
hurry to her suggestion, perhaps quite setting it aside in his 
superior keenness, as though there were things, notwithstand- 
ing her cleverness, that he cannot quite venture to discuss fully 
with her. Perhaps his hurry and his reticence tell their own 
story, and she has her own little counter-reserve concerning 
his sagacity. 

Hollis spoke quickly, though his eye shot an inquiry in ad- 
vance of his words, and his face was blanker than he knew with 
surprise. The nod of his head came a little behindhand for 
due effect. 

“ 1 ’ve mistrusted considerable,” he said, in a wary way. 

“ You may depend everything ain’t exactly as it seems, over 
there, clear through. I ’ve my doubts about Mrs. Newell being 
quite the invaleed she makes out to be.” And there he paused 
a second, with a glance again, to note whether he had hit upon 
the responsive string. “ I b’lieve she gets up nights an’ helps 
herself in the pantry, ’r else what keeps her so fat, while she 
pecks at her reg’lar food like a chicken 1 ” 

If he had been an unmodified Yankee, he would have said 
“ Mis’ Newell,” and “ victuals.” But he had not come so far in 
his culture as to put the “ u ” into “ regular,” or to be content 
with both “ i ” ’s alike in “ invalid.” It is interesting to watch 
the little steps, and corresponding halts, in human progress. 

Sarell flashed her red rose and her bright eyes round at 
him, with something a great deal more definite in their ques- 
tion than his own tentative glances had conveyed, while he 
stated his impression ; but when he adduced his reasoning, the 
grasp of her expression relaxed out of her face, as if failing of 
what it caught at ; and she said with impatience, her look 
turned disregardingly upon the wheel-tire as it followed the 
rut on her side, “ 0, if that ’s all, folks that are fat never 
air great eaters. I thought mebbe you ’d really noticed some- 
thing.” 

“ Well, I have,” returned Hollis slowly, as one who still had 
a large fund of information to draw on at discretion, “ but I 
never thought it worth while to take notice. It ’s hern, fair 
enough, if she wants it ; it ’s all her own ; but why don’t she 


GOOD AT A HOLD-BACK. 


67 


take it in daylight ] Only night before last, there was half a 
custard pie in the back buttery that was gone in the mornin’ 
when 1 went in for the milk-pails, and ’f 1 did n’t hear some- 
body up and round underneath my room that had petticoats 
on, — well ’t was the cat, then ; or the rooster.” 

“ Petticoats ! ” ejaculated Sarell musingly. And then she 
turned full face upon Hollis. “ Don’t you take notice, for 
your life, to anybody but me. But do you notice every bit 
you can, and tell me. There ’s queerer things than ghosts in 
some families. But you can’t prove a ghost by hollerin’. 
That only scatters ’em. On your word an’ honor, Hollis, 
don’t tell anybody an identical word but me, an’ tell me 
everything ! ” 

Hollis laid down the reins in his lap, and returned her look 
in sheer astonishment. Then his wise pre-eminence recollected 
and reasserted itself. He lifted the reins, with a careless twitch 
and a chuckle to the horse. 

“ I ’ll see about it,” he said. “ I ’d sooner obleege you than 
most folks.” 

“ See you do then,” said Sarell uncompromisingly, perceiving 
quite well that she had obtained all from him that he had to 
give at present ; and she dropped the subject, with the interest 
and the mystery all on her own side. 

In a few minutes more, they drove down the long, green 
Valley Street of Hawksbury. 


68 


ODD, OK EVEN > 


CHAPTER IX. 

THE EAST ROOM AT EAST HOLLOW. 

Mother Pemble’s latch was down. 

Deacon Ambrose, coming in with papers in his hands, through 
the little keeping-room and passage beyond, to the door at the 
end that opened into Mother Pemble’s room at its back comer, 
found it so. He also smelled, as he stood there and turned 
softly the useless outer knob, an odor of origanum and other 
pungent oils. 

“ Ca-at ! ” he sputtered, letting the whisper drop from the 
comers of senile-spreading lips, like a drool of acrid poison ; 
“ rubbin’ her old paws, and goin’ to sleep over it ! She would n’t 
wake up this ha’af hour, ’f she beared me cornin’.” 

So he released the knob as softly as he had tried it, turned 
noiselessly, — for Deacon Amb was of the cat species himself, 
and had a way of slipping off his out-door, heavy shoes and 
entering the inner rooms with woollen-stockinged feet, — and 
went down the blind little passage to the keeping-room, where 
he slid his papers into the inside breast-pocket of his stringy 
alpaca coat, took the last number of the Reade Weekly Watch- 
word, and sat down, to weary out contrariness with a patience 
every bit as contrary. 

“ One for the last play. Mis’ Pemble ! ” he whispered again, 
nodding virulently toward the open passage. “ ’N I guess I ’ll 
hold out ’s long ’s you will, ’f ye air laid up to keep, there, so 
comfortable. Ye may lay, and look, and listen ; an’ bedrid folks 
may last forever, s they say ; but good legs, ’n keepin’ abaout 
on ’em, ’s a better resate, ’cordin’ to my notion. ’N my father 
was ninety-nine year an’ six days, to a minute, when he died.” 

Mother Pemble had heard that often enough ; it was like 


THE EAST ROOM AT EAST HOLLOW. 


69 


“ Selah ” in the Psalms, to the deacon’s topics and sentences ; 
he managed to get it in, or to wind up with it, whatever he 
began with. 

But “ things ain’t never as you count on,” Mother Pemble 
said to herself. “ He ’s got that ninety-nine year an’ six days so 
set in his mind that he ’ll slip up in one of the seventies yet, 
while he ’s a lookin’ forrud to it. An’ if there ain’t a cretur sur- 
prised, there never was one. I ’d like to be a fly on the wall, 
in t’ other world, to see him come in ! ” 

All the flies in Egypt could not have been in all the places 
where Mother Pemble had wished herself “ on the wall ” in 
that wise. 

Meanwhile, she was, as a fly on the wall, in the “ east settin’- 
room,” with the big “ seckerterry,” against the opposite wall, 
or rather against the door into the front passage of the house, 
which she would have closed in that way when she first took to 
her bed and her imprisonment here. The south parlor, oppo- 
site, had a second entrance from a little porch of its own, through 
which visitors often came and went. Mother Pemble “ did n’t 
want to be all out-doors,” she said. 

The east room was large and pleasant enough to dispense 
with that communication. Its two windows to the sunrise, — 
a little south of east, so that they were sunrise windows all the 
year, and gave long mornings of instreaming light and warmth 
even late into the winter, — and its one wide one, with sliding 
shutters, to the north, looked out brightly across broad mead- 
ows on the one side, to far, beautiful, wooded hills and blue 
peaks ; and on the other up against a near sheltering slope 
that was green now with huckleberry pastures and pine woods, 
and in the winter broke the force of wind and storm, and gave 
warm shelter upon that side the farmhouse. There was a re- 
cess, under the front stair-landing, beyond the secretary, on the 
same side, that opened through a closet in the remaining space 
under the same, into the parlor; so that in the hot, southerly 
days she could have the breeze through there, without exposure 
or intrusion ; for her bed stood in the east corner, with the 
north window to her right and the southeasterly ones to her 
left, as she lay. 


70 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


Mother Pemble was very particular to have this closet door 
kept bolted on her own side, at all times except just in those 
“ hot spells ” when she must have the air from that way. At 
night she would always have it fastened. The big secretaiy 
was hidden from entire view by the high footboard of the bed- 
stead. She could not see what Ambrose drew forth or stowed 
away in its antique receptacles, when he sat before it, fumbling, 
in his slow, tiresome fashion, among his papers. Ambrose 
chuckled and grinned to himself over this ; and would doubtless 
have long ago insisted on the secretary being moved elsewhere, 
had it not been for the satisfaction of keeping his affairs and 
his hidden deposits right there, “ under Mis’ Pemble’s nose, as 
’t were,” and yet utterly beyond her observation and cognizance. 

Whether foolishly, or with a sly relish of some sort yet deeper 
than Uncle Amb’s, she gave him an opportunity, every now 
and then, for a full tasting of his side of the enjoyment. 

For instance, “What are you turnin’ over there, Amb 1 ” 
she asked at one time, when a voluminous rustle of some clean, 
crisp documents had struck her ear. 

“ Old stiffikits,” he answered her ; and then came a thump, 
as he lifted some heavy ledger down upon the desk from a 
higher shelf. 

“ Old fiddlesticks ! ” she returned, but not out and out crossly, 
either ; for Deacon Amb and Mrs. Pemble were always pretty 
civil, conversationally, to each other. “ What do you want to 
keep ’em for, let alone rummagin’ ’em up, the whole durin’ 
time ? ” 

“ 0, yer never know when things may come up to be of conser- 
quence. I like to keep old scores where I can lay hand on ’em.” 

“ Air they all old scores, Ambrose 1 Air ye sure ye ain’t dip- 
pin’ into anything niew 1 ” 

“ What ’v I got to dip with, Mother Pemble ? ” 

“ 0, 1 d’know, yer turnin’ things over all the time, an’ ye ain’t 
bound to nobody. Care’line, she ain’t got the curiosity of a 
miskeeter. Not half,” she emended, as the excess of her illus- 
tration occurred to her. “ I ’d like to be a fly on the wall up 
there over that old seckerterry.” 

“ I lay ye would, Mother Pemble,” came from the deacon, in 


THE EAST ROOM AT EAST HOLLOW. 71 

a tone that showed his lips were wide stretched, and vibrant 
with an inward tickle, 

“ Ef ye die, Arab, leave me the old seckerterry, and what- 
ever ’s in it, will ye 1 ” 

“ I ain’t agoin’ to die,” 

“What, never!” 

It was before the days of Pinafore, 

“ Well, not in your time. My father lived to be ninety-nine 
years an’ six days, to a minute,” 

“ You won’t,” 

“ Why ! ” the deacon was putting together and tying a file 
of papers, and eked out the conversation to his employment, 
which he was thus finishing, 

“ ’Cause yer alwers talkin’ about it ; an’ things that ’s alwers 
talked about never come to pass,” 

“ I was talkin’ about my father, and he came to pass, as I 
tell yer. Ye can’t alter that with any talkin’,” 

The deacon shut a ponderous drawer, and turned the key in 
a sounding lock. Then the bunch of steel rattled as he dropped 
It into the depth of his trousers pocket. He turned to cross 
the room diagonally to the keeping-room passage. 

As he did so, he stopped short on the other diagonal, between 
the bed with Mrs, Pemble in it, and a little door, beneath which 
a wooden step protruded, beside the chimney, that ran up in 
the fourth corner, 

“ How come that on the jar ! ” he asked, 

“ Care’line was up ther yist’day afternoon, after some elder- 
blows ; ’n the cat come down this morn in’. She never latches 
a door ; an’ the cat ’s forever at her heels, I just hev t’ lay here, 
t’ the mercy of everything,” she ended, turning her head on 
the pillow with an articulated sigh, 

“ That ’s so,” said the deacon blandly. 

The door that was ajar only led up into a little, sloping attic. 

Mother Pemble’s extra latch, that had no thumb-piece on the 
outer side, was down, now, heavy and fast, in its deep iron 
catch ; the deacon waited, the flies buzzing about him as he 
read the Watchword, and the smell of the origanum penetrating 
all the way out here. 


72 


ODD, on EVEN ? 


It was no use to rattle or knock. It was her one defence and 
privilege ; and Mother Pemble asserted it to the utmost. 

The door was across the room, opposite her bed ; but a stout 
linen cord, knotted through a drill-hole in the latch, passed, by 
means of a couple of pulleys, up tbe wall and along a beam in 
the old ceiling, to where it could drop, at her right hand, down 
to a brass button in the edge of the bedstead frame beside her. 
When the loop in the end of the cord was around the button, 
the room was fast against intrusion. Mother Pemble could 
sleep, or think, or patch her calico pieces, or knit her shells, or 
read her Bible, — which she actually did do without disturbing 
that side of her mind upon which another sort of latch was 
down, — in the most absolute quietness. When the loop three 
inches back along the line was buttoned, all the world, that 
was ever welcome, was welcome to come in. And Mother 
Pemble was clever enough not to drive her world away from 
her by fidgetiness and petulance. She only “ would have her 
own time to herself when she wanted it,” she said, “ sence ’t was 
all she could have, in the way of independence.” 

True, she had her “ kicksy-wicksy ” days, as Sarell has said ; 
days when it was “ clear torment for her to lay still and keep 
herself out o’ things that she knew she could straighten out if 
she was only round amongst ’em ” ; for she kept the run of all 
that went on in the household, and the hitches in the run- 
ning, and had a word upon most matters, as much as ever. 
How tormenting it was for her to submit to her outward inac- 
tion, perhaps no one with all her “ kicksy-wicksiness ” could 
comprehend. Wherefore, as her easy-going Care’line said about 
it to the deacon, in slow, soft speech, with her mouth far parted 
in her vowel emphasis, “ We must take all things into con- 
sideration.” 

“ That ’s so,” the deacon would assent, quite comfortably, 
in like manner as he assented to its being “ to the mercy of 
everything ” that she did lie there so helpless. 

“ The ways of Providence is the best ways,” he was wont to 
declare with meekness. 

When Mother Pemble heard him say that, a queer gleam of 
satisfaction would come into her restless g^ay eyes, as if she 


THE EAST ROOM AT EAST HOLLOW. 73 

and Providence had some private and more express under- 
standing. 

She had a good deal, moreover, in the way of independence, 
besides her seclusion at will. She would do all for herself — 
and, to do her justice, a good deal for other people — that two 
hands in the stationary radius of the reach of hers could do. 

She diligently rubbed the hands and the arms with the 
strengthening liniment, “ to hold on to what was left of her.” 
The lower limbs were supposed to rest, almost helpless, beneath 
the bedclothes. Not paralyzed exactly, she always insisted 
upon that, but as good as paralyzed with the weakness of dis- 
use. For the trouble that had “settled in her back” seven 
years ago had prevented her from lifting herself to a support- 
ing attitude all that time. . She had given up to her necessity, 
and turned her capableness to the devising and directing of 
every little means for rendering her establishment comfortable 
to herself, and the care of it easily manageable by others. 

Her bed was double ; one half was thoroughly made up while 
she' lay upon the other. And a swing sacking, in the place of 
a sheet, raised and lowered by pulleys, passed her from one side 
to the other, and was then unbuckled at its corners and drawn 
away, leaving her upon the fresh one ; whose corners, in turn, 
were buckled to corner straps upon the mattress, making a 
smooth, unruffleable spread beneath her, so essential a comfort 
to an invalid, and could remain so fixed for several days. 

A large shallow bag, which nobody ever meddled with but 
herself, hung at her hand by the bed-frame. Here she had her 
handkerchiefs, her liniment and other bottles, her knitting-work, 
and all the small appliances and accumulations of her circum- 
scribed existence and occupations. When she wanted these 
cleared out or disposed of, she attended to it as one of her 
diversions. She was “sufferin’ neat,” as Elviry said, and kept 
all these heterogeneous affairs purely distinct, undefiled, and 
undefiling. Every bottle was tightly corked and scrupulously 
dried to a clear polish ; every piece and bit rolled away in its 
proper separation. “ It was wonderful how few rags and towels 
she did use, considerin’ all her rubbin’ and hand-washin’, and 
meal-takin’ in bed.” 


74 


ODD, OR EVEN? 

A lap table, with socket holes and upright edges, came down 
and ascended again, at her own touch, between the ceiling and 
the bed before her, with convenient furnishings ready set; a flat 
drawer in it held napkins and towels. A washbowl, set in the 
mouth of a dark-wood cylinder, which held a capacious recepta- 
cle for the waste from it, was arranged with a lid which could 
be pushed around aside upon a swivel ; and the whole, mounted 
on three short legs with casters, constituted a lightstand table. 
The swivel-rod at the back branched above into a support for an 
upper shelf, upon which stood a water-jar with a faucet. This 
had been an intricate study and a sublime achievement between 
herself and the cabinet-maker of Reade. A smaller basin of tin, 
which she could set before her upon the bed, and a little dip- 
per, hung at the side of the cylinder. 

Specific mention of these, as among the arrangements by 
which the recluse could help and amuse herself, with her skilled 
and yet active hands, in really quite a little housekeeping of her 
own, will enable the credit and comprehension of possibility in 
regard to certain things that must have been possible to the 
enactment of her part in all that follows, to be told. 

There was nothing but the most primitive simplicity in them 
all ; no plumber or modern mechanic would ever have so contrived 
them ; they were like a hundred household devices and expedi- 
ents usually confined to dairy and kitchen, not extended to 
personal luxury or indulgence, which these farmer-folk set at 
work to serve their turn, without waiting for machinist or 
patent. Mother Pemble had thought them all out, one by one, 
as she came to the requirements which they answered. A few 
gimlet and auger holes, bits of pipe, hooks and pulleys, carried 
them into operation; the old raftered ceiling and solid wood- 
work of her room gave hint and place for their appliance. 

The neighbors thought they were “ dreadful ’cute, and must 
save the other womenfolks a sight of work ” : that was all. 
Nobody regarded them as in the least allied to pretence or 
splendor ; though with a little concealment of their easy gear, 
or refinement of external form, they might figure among the 
last touches of exquisite invention in any fine city palace, 
where living is sublimated almost above the hindrance or re- 
minder of any common needs. 


THE EAST ROOM AT EAST HOLLOW. 


76 


Mother Pemble washed her own cups and saucers and spoons ; 
replaced them upon her table, and swung the table up out of 
her way. She rinsed out her bits of linen and flannel. She 
made her own tea with the “sperrit lamp,” whenever she 
wanted it, which was apt to be at very odd hours ; odder, may- 
be, than the household knew. Whatever else she did, that 
perhaps gave object and relief to her monotonous restraint, may 
come in in its further oi-der and relation. 

She accomplished the family mending and quite a vast 
amount of useful and ingenious making, with needle, knitting- 
pins, and rug-hook. 

“ I don’t get any more done for me than I do back,” she said 
often to others, and yet more often to herself. She seemed to 
keep some kind of account, in this wise, with her conscience ; 
perhaps with the Bible, that lay beside her on the lightstand. 

When at last the big latch clicked upward, this afternoon 
that Deacon Ambrose waited, he waited on some fifteen minutes 
longer. 

She ’s in more of a tiew th’n I am,” he said complacently, 
to himself ; then, having secured knowledge that he could enter 
at his pleasure, without betraying his waiting and watchfulness 
by any second ineflectual trial at the door, he even slipped on 
his heavy, shufiling shoes again, picked up his straw hat, and 
walked out at the end door and around past her north window, 
toward the barnway. 

Mother Pemble contracted the muscles of her upper lip, as 
his shadow went across her daylight, so that the tip of her nose 
elevated itself, and the nostrils expanded, with a fine, amused 
scorn. 

“ ’Z if I could n’t see through that ! ” she said to herself. 
“ He ’s got something more ’n common to stow away or to 
git aout, he ’s so turrible unconcerned. ’N to-merrer ’s Hawks- 
berry day, ’m — ’m ! ” 

She knit on ; half a white shell for the pretty bedspread 
that she was making, of soft, smooth, slender cotton cord. 

“ Heap it up, heap it up ! yer don’ know who ’s t’ gether it 
and that ’s a fact ! nor haow ! ” she added, with a silent laugh, 
that showed good firm teeth and the only two wrinkles in her 


76 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


cheeks, that were but the lengthened and deepened dimples of 
her youth. “ There ’s other things savin’ up that ye don’t calk’- 
late on. What might ’a been all wore out by this time, and 
Care’line left t’ shift f’r ’erself. ’T ain’t bus’lin’’raound that 
brings things t’ pass, alwers, not even in haousework. — You 
save up dullars, and I ’ll save up years ! ” and the still laugh 
came again. 

She dared say that to herself and laugh that laugh, with that 
bound word of the Lord of all days and years lying beside her 
at her right hand, wherein she read, “The fear of the Lord 
prolongeth days ; but the years of the wicked shall be short- 
ened.” And, “ Behold, the day of the Lord cometh as a thief 
in the night.” 

Such things men and women do read in the Scripture of the 
Book, and of events all around them, and yet set their own 
word and their own act, as things separate from the line and 
order of God’s ; or somehow able to establish their motive and 
security upon some partial point or base of his law, along- 
side their unshakable certainties. 

Ambrose Newell was a self-seeking, secret man ; he was to 
be circumvented. That was a piece of everlasting justice. 
“ Why was he to keep his goods back, and the good of ’em, all 
his life long, and turn clear honest only after he was dead and 
could n’t care ? ” Mother Pemble would see to that. She 
thought the circumvention lay in her hands. “After he 
was dead, it would be other folks’ turn to care, and to 
make up their minds. ’T wan’t to be his say, whose rights 
came fust and whose was biggest. ’F he did put it all inter 
pussonal.” 

Ambrose came in, and unlocked the old piece of furniture at 
its grooved front, that rolled back from before its pigeon-holes 
and drawers in the way imitated again of late years, let down 
the desk-board, unlocked and pulled out the deep right-hand 
drawer below it, sat down in the big armchair with its sheaf- 
shaped carved bars at the back, — an heirloom in itself to 
modern-antique covetousness, — and settled himself and his 
handful of papers for work. 

There was an elliptical space between the corner-post of the 


THE EAST ROOM AT EAST HOLLOW. 


77 


bedstead and its scrolled footboard that was in one solid middle 
piece, through which Mother Pemble, over her glasses and her 
knitting, could see his right arm and hand, and that right-hand 
drawer, projected, open, below the desk-board. Her needles 
clicked indefatigably ; her eyes as indefatigably followed every 
movement in that half view. 

The deacon drew a wallet and a pair of scissors from a 
pigeon-hole. Mother Pemble saw the clear shine of the steel 
as he took them down from their upper corner, and again the 
lip-muscles shortened and the nostrils spread. 

A quiet unfolding of some crackling, parchment-like sheet, 
and — after a reflective interval such as a careful man is apt to- 
observe between the taking out of his pocket-book and the 
abstraction of any of its money contents — a soft clipping, with 
an inevitable gentle rustling, followed. 

“ What ’r ye doin’, Ambrose 1 ” asked the old lady, as she 
always asked. 

The deacon’s lips stretched in the opposite way from that of 
the uplifting of her’s. 'fhe long, in-fallen line between the 
shrunken jaws grew longer and set tighter, and his eyes 
twinkled in a corresponding lengthening and closure of their 
lids. 

From between the lips, in sound as if he held a pin between, 
came the answer, — such a one as usual, — “ Cutt’n up old 
papers, mother. Wan’ t’ make some lamplighters'?” 

“ Some time, p’r’aps. Not now, Amb.” 

Then the scissors clipped again ; cut slowly, rather, as a man 
uses them ; with as much accent in the opening as in the closing 
of the blades. 

“Them scissors squeak, Amb. Ain’t ye Traid they’ll tell 
somethin’ 1 ” 

“ Scissors’ all right, mother.” 

“ Then you squeak, handlin’ of ’em. Somethin’ squeaks.” 

Mother Pemble’s longitudinal dimples were very deep, with 
her pleasure at her own deep under-meaning. 

“ Ther ’s alwers something squeaks when I ’m busy at this 
’ere seckerterry,” returned Uncle Amb, his facial parallel of 
latitude extending itself in correspondence with Mother Pern- 


78 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


ble’s meridian lines. If they could have seen each other they 
might have enjoyed their game still more. Perhaps they 
would have had to play it yet deeper. 

“ Ambrose,” said the old lady, after a pause in which she had 
knotted off one shell, laid it aside in the little basket on her 
table, and increased her first single stitch toward another by a 
few turnings to a number that held her needle comfortably 
well, “I shouldn’t be a mite surprised — sha’! I’ve missed a 
stitch ! — I should n’t be a single mite surprised — and I b’lieve 
my heart you air — ef you was a cuttiu’ off cowponds.” 

“ ’F I was, I guess yer heart ’d hev y’ aout an’ afoot to see 
abaout it, ’f ye hed t’ go thriew a hoss-pond ! ” And Uncle 
Amb folded up the crackling paper. 

“’Taint the age o’ merricles; ’n yit ther might be sech a 
thing ’s ’t I sh’d be aout n’ abaout, f ’r all, afore I die. ’F I 
ain’t, I will be after, ’f ye don’t keep things straight an’ above- 
board, Ambrose Newell, — I go fust. That I tell ye.” 

“Ye’d like to be a fly on the wall, wouldn’t yel” retorted 
the deacon, rising up and rolling forward the secretary front 
again, and turning the key, shutting and locking the deep 
drawer also, as he folded back the desk-lid. “ Ye ’d buzz, 
would n’t ye? Well, I shouldn’t kind o’ wonder ef ’twas what 
ye would be, ’f the Lord saves all the piece's, an’ makes the 
most he can out o ’m.” 

“I s’pose ye know what kind o’ stuff calls the flies the 
most, deacon. An’ ef there ’s any buzzin after you, ’t ’ll be 
because o’ somethin’ in the natur’ o’ things, I persume.” 

Mrs. Pemble always called her son-in-law “ deacon ” when 
she gave him the most despiteful thrusts. The deacon in him 
was truly the thing she despised most of all. 

The tall secretary, with its age-dark, polished front and 
cresting carvings, its three bright, pineapple-shaped gilt knobs 
on the three highest points of these, stood straight and 
massive and still, holding its secrets; and the deacon walked 
away, his keys jingling in his pocket. 

The old lady, whom he left lying there in a Tantalus plight 
that was safety and exultation to him, however, and the 
more because it was bitterly aggravated penance to her, waited 


THE EAST ROOM AT EAST HOLLOW. 79 

. till she heard him go away out through the keeping-room to 
the shed-kitchen, where a swing-door flapped to after him. 

Then the knitting-work dropped upon the counterpane; a 
hand reached to the cord and the brass button, changed the 
loops, and the iron latch fell with a small clang ; the gray eyes 
gave a swift glance to the muslin-shaded windows, right and 
left, whose w'eighted lines hung over the high, uncurtained 
frame of the bedstead, to be also within her command; and the 
figure of the woman raised itself straight up from her pillows, 
and sat erect. 

“When I come even with him,” she said, — Mother Pemble 
talked much to herself in her imprisonment, in a low, careful, 
monotonous voice, without ever thinking of the convenience of 
the present chronicle, — “ the only damper ’ll be that he won’t 
be here to know. ’Less — ther ’s no tellin’ — it might come so ’s 
’t he ’d be fixed some as I be, fer awhile. I might be gitt’n 
abaout, ’s he ’d be clampin’ daowm. I ’d like t’ be sett’n ’t that 
seckerterry once, when he could n’t do nor say nothin’, only 
look! The world’s a troublesome kentry, but it turns itself 
over every day : we must jest wait, ’n see how the times rolls 
raound ! ” 

She sat half an hour in her erect position ; then she short- 
ened the latch-cord again, and laid herself back as they always 
saw her. 

She drew the muslin shades up also. The rosy reflection of 
the sunset light was full upon the soft clouds that were floating 
away, over the distant w'oods, against the breasts of the great 
hills. The bare scarp, even, of storm-whitened granite on the 
top of the north ridge was flushed with a lovely pink. Over 
its line lay the mellow saffron-green that spread along the sky 
from where the sun, still far up in the summer latitude, was 
going down in an ocean of pure gold. 

“ It ’s a charmin’ pleasant evenin’,” Mother Pemble said wist- 
fully, looking out into that sereneness of pure atmosphere and 
the glory that infilled it. She sighed as she said it, as one 
might sigh who had lost the freedom of sunsets and sweet, 
warm atmospheres, except as they might creep in to her, with a 
kind of pitying mercy, through door and casement, or glow 


80 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


down upon her from afar, in mere scraps and hints of that 
which was widening and shining all round the blessed bend 
that held and brooded over the fruitful, sky-seeking hills. 

“ It ’s a pleasant time ; but ’t ain’t my time. I ’ll hev t’ wait 
f’r that. Well, it’s a good day that ’s alwers cornin’. It ’ll be 
fair to-moiTo’, f’r Ambrose t’ go t’ Hawksberry.” 

And with that, those sinister old wrinkle-dimples deepened 
up her cheeks again, and her eyes took a cold, malign bright- 
ness, like the steely glitter of low-lying, dangerous water, in 
secret clefts where a true dayshine never comes. 

She did not look at the sunset color afterward. When she 
remembered it again, it had slipped from the hill-tops and the 
cloud-edges, and they were gray with falling shadow. 

Yet away down in the west, where she could not see, — 
having shut herself, of her choice, to the shady side of her 
world, — there were purples, and flecks of flame, and here and 
there, between the mountain-swells, sweet pools of distant 
amber Vying still and clear, like lakes of heaven. 


THE GREAT PYRAMID. 


SI 


CHAPTER X. 

THE GREAT PYRAMID. 

One night, Miss Tredgold stayed out walking and talking 
with Rael till it was late. France waited for her, wondering, 
with a letter that had come for her by a chance hand from the 
village from the later mail. 

They had gone down into what France called “ The Pleas- 
aunce,” — a great natural park of noble groups of elms upon a 
slope, and spreading through a hollow, turfed with crisp pas- 
ture grasses, toward the brook-side. A tangle of birches and 
alders and catbrier fringed the limit here, and hid the brown, 
shallow water, across which a great scatter of white boulder- 
stones gave way for crossing to the pretty cedar woods that 
climbed the steep hill on the other side. France had seen them 
from the window of Miss Ammah’s room, and she felt an irri- 
tated jealousy of Miss Ammah’s monopoly. “ I wonder if she 
thinks I ’m not fit ! Or if” — “ she fancies it would n’t do,” were 
the words half shaped in her mind, and for which she gave her 
self, with a gasp, a mental clutch upon the throat. “ An old 
woman can do anything ! a young one can’t get to be friends 
with — people — till — well, I suppose you can sympathize, any 
time ; but there can’t be much freshness in it ! ” 

She did not know what freshness in Miss Ammah, at fifty- 
five, was answering at that moment to the words of the man of 
twenty-three, jusf; finding himself out to be a man, with a 
man’s need and hope in life, and not only his father’s and moth- 
er’s boy, good boy as he had been and meant to be. 

“ I shall keep on,” he said. “ I had no notion of taking my 
hand from the plough. Only, if you had thought my plan pos- 
sible, — that I could in the course of a few years do both things. 
But I see ; it would n’t only be to pay off this, and clear the 


82 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


farm. Father ’ll be getting old, and mother must n’t have to 
work so hard always. I must help them make the farm pay 
afterward. Miss Tredgold, it ’s been a great lift, anyway, hav- 
ing you come here these summers. I would n’t have missed it ; 
but I suppose it ’s like all lifts : it makes it harder to drop 
back, if you must drop.” 

“ Why drop, Rael 1 No one ever need do that from any real 
lift.” 

Rael smiled gravely in the twilight. 

“ There ’s a natural body, and there ’s a spiritual body,” he 
said. “ It ’s a wrench to have the inner man drawn up, and the 
outside fellow kept down by a contrary pull then.” 

Miss Tredgold did not instantly reply to that. 

“ I ’ve had Mr. Kingsworth,” — Mr. Kingsworth was the 
rather unusual minister, and Israel’s strong friend, — “ and I ’ve 
had you. And this summer ” — a long hesitancy here — “ I ’ve 
realized more than ever that I could n’t be quite as happy always, 
after knowing such people, if you were all to go away, and none 
such were ever to cross my road again. I ’m not feeling myself 
above my neighbors. Miss Tredgold ; but I feel that there are 
folks above us all. And it ’ll take a lot to satisfy me now, — 
to settle down amongst. — I shall have to — ” 

Still Miss Tredgold kept silence. 

“ I only meant,” he resumed, tossing off his words now in a 
quick, careless way, as if they but illustrated the present con- 
scious feeling, and had no present point or feeling of their own, 
“ that some time I shall have to marry. Farmers all do. And 
a man ought n’t to be able to think of any other possible w^omau 
as above his wife, you see.” 

“ I see,” Miss Tredgold answered slowly, and not instantly. 
“ And that a man ought n’t to be able to think of any shape of 
home and life that the woman he marries cannot help him 
make. Yes, I see all that. But it will be macfe straight, Rael ; 
if you do the right thing, it can’t lead anywhere but right. And 
there are two concerned, remember God cares for that woman 
who should be your wife, wherever she is, as much as he cares 
for you.” 

“ God bless her ! ” broke from Rael’s lips impulsively, and he 


THE GREAT PYRAMID. 


83 


put up his hand and slightly lifted his hat from his head. Miss 
Ammah’s words, and the heart in them, brought him, for the 
moment, spirit to spirit as if face to face with that woman 
unknown. Yes, really unknown ; for the woman he had seen 
this summer stood to his conscious thought as scarcely more 
than a revelation of possibility; yet the possibility had come 
close enough to make him pray that prayer. 

They came up out of the shadow of the last group of elms, to 
the bar-place and to the roadway ; they did not talk any more, 
and seemed to France, still watching from the window, quite 
prosily and stupidly trudging along on the opposite edgeways of 
the soft brown, deep-rutted road. 

Miss Ammah w'as saying to herself, “ It has been a perfect 
shame of me ! blind, old, blundering ninny ! but what shall I 
do now 1 ” 

Miss Ammah did that which was foreordained ; she could not 
have done a cleverer thing, perhaps, if she had planned it. 
She carried a cold up with her from that lovely, sweet-smelling, 
treacherous brookside ; she managed to put a fatigue on top of 
that within a day or two ; and, with all the rest, she kept on 
worrying and calling herself names. When Sunday came round, 
she made up her mind to “ give up to it ” ; she set her room in 
perfect order, to the last small furnishing of dressing and washing 
table, put a fresh rufiBled sacque and plaited cap on, measured 
out for herself two kinds of homoeopathic medicines in two tea- 
cups with time-dial covers, placed them on her lightstand with 
her Bible and her eye-glasses and her ‘'Christian Eegister” 
that had come the night before, — and lay down upon her bed, 
where she never moved from the first position she fell into for 
three whole hours. 

“ Resting,” she told France, when France looked in and won- 
dered ; and shut her eyes in such determined, effigy-like still- 
ness tliat the girl felt ordered to go away, and went. But by 
noon the languor had become a fever, and France went, fright- 
ened, to Mrs. Heybrook, and Mrs. Heybrook “ took hold ” ; not- 
withstanding which prompt and capable assistance, the three 
hours’ rest settled and prolonged itself into a three weeks’ seri- 
ous illness. 


84 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


The first week, France was visible only in the kitchen when 
she came there to get the beef-tea that stood ready, or to pre- 
pare a gruel or a whey, or sitting solitary at her corner of the 
table in the dining-room, snatching a brief meal. Then came 
a night or two of anxious watching, when nobody really went 
to bed, except Lyman and the old farmer, when Sarell kept 
things hot in the kitchen, and Mrs. Heybrook “ camped down ” 
in France’s bedroom, trying to take turns with France, who 
would not give up her turn at all, and Israel lay on the lounge 
in the best room below, with the doors all open, that “ anybody 
might speak to him at any minute.” And those nights France 
found, every two hours at least, the water-pitcher in the hall- 
way at the stairhead changed for one fresh from the cold, 
delicious well, and twice each vigil some dainty bit of food 
newly placed in a dish beside it. 

The second week, Rael began to bring field and forest deli- 
cacies : now a few far-fetched, late, north-side ripened straw- 
berries ; again, the earliest raspberries, sought, one by one 
almost, on the sunniest arches of vines sunniest-sheltered to 
the south ; then a trout, just out of the water, whose delicate, 
pale-pink flesh came up from the broil like a bit of the breast 
of a tender little bird : and at France’s table-corner, morning 
and evening, was always a dish of the fruit she was fondest of, 

— picked currants, the biggest and ripest from each cluster, 
full-juiced from the stems they had drunk through within five 
minutes. 

The third week, they began to amuse and talk with Miss 
Ammah ; and Rael came into the room, and read aloud various 
things that the minister, who called often to inquire, had lent 
him, or that Miss Ammah had been looking at and talking 
about with him before. And France sometimes sat downstairs 
in the broad back piazza hours together, while he was above 
there or Miss Ammah “ rested ” — sweet convalescent rest now 

— alone, with a hand-bell on the stand beside her, to touch if 
she wanted anybody, or sat in the great pillowed easy-chair, 
napping and waking alternately, with Mrs. Heybrook and her 
afternoon patchwork keeping her company in the opposite 
corner. 


THE GREAT PYRAMID. 


85 

It was in this third week that France stumbled upon the 
Great Pyramid. She found it on the settee there one day, — 
Piazzi Smyth’s wonderful book of “ Our Inheritance.” It had 
Bernard Kingsworth’s name on the fly-leaf : of course, Rael Hey- 
brook was reading it. 

She turned it over wonderingly, trying to get an idea of it 
from its chapter-titles and grand Scripture prefixes. She read 
the preface, where the “ parable in mathematical and physical 
science” is spoken of, and the “stones put together in vocal and 
meaning shapes,” to be correctly read in the fulness of time, 
and “ bear witness in the latter days.” She looked curiously at 
the illustrations, the Great Pyramid “ at the centre and border 
of the sector-shaped land,” “ Egypt in the geographical centre 
of the land-surface of the world,” the plans of the circles of 
the heavens above the Great Pyramid, at the far-oflf epochs of 
antiquity, showing the places of the polar stars and the Pleiades 
and the equinox, as they could be only at vast recurrent cycles. 
She got vague hints of a tremendous thought at once sacred 
and scientific, wrapped in terms and demonstrations of a knowl- 
edge that she could not handle or interpret ; and she opened 
where the leaves fell easily apart, at marvellous suggestions and 
applications of noble, universal standards of measure for line 
and weight and time, based upon solar distance and planet- 
density, making God’s measures and man’s measures identical in 
absolute truth ; at proofs and prophecies of things that are and 
shall be ; and at the figuring forth of the Great Pyramid wait- 
ing, silent, with all this word in it, — this “ sign and witness 
unto the Lord of Hosts in the land of Egypt.” 

She was fond of mathematics and astronomy, — what she 
knew of them. She was fascinated by their grand general de- 
ductions always. She lost herself in these strange pages, which, 
if quite sure and true in what they put forth, should be as a 
revelation to the whole world; and she wondered that she came 
upon the book here in this farmhouse among the hills, lent out of 
the library of a country minister for the reading of a country 
youth, who drove his plough to field in the springtime, and 
toiled all day under the hot summer sun to gather hay into his 
father’s gray old barns. 


86 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


While she sat there, as gentle a picture as Lady Jane Grey 
may have been over her old Plato, — the look in her face of one 
illumined by a great sunrise toward which she turned new, won- 
dering eyes, — Israel Heybrook came out from the sitting-room 
door, and stood in the other end of the piazza. She turned 
her head, graceful-modest with soft, simple lines of hair swept 
back over the temples and ears, and rolled together low behind. 
The high, stylish crown and puffs had disappeared during all 
these weeks of nursing. Somehow, in that small difference even, 
it had seemed as if a fence were down. Any way, she looked 
as a woman only can look when she is not “ stylish,” but purely 
and sweetly feminine. 

“ Do you understand all thisl” she asked him. 

He came and stood by her side. She moved along the old 
red settee, and he sat down in the place she made for him. So 
she turned the leaves over and back to passages that had 
struck her attention, or where marks were made, and she had 
studied over some paragraphs. 

“ See this,” she said, “ about the English farmer’s ‘ quarters ’ 
for his wheat-measures, — that they are simply quarters of the 
capacity of the coffer in that ‘ king’s chamber ’ in the heart of 
the pyramid that this man thinks was set there for a true 
measure for all people to deal with. And see this, about 
capacity-measure founding itself upon the whole bulk of the 
earth, taking a fraction of its diameter for unit, while line- 
measure takes a fi'action of the radius, the line along which 
they measure between the centres of sphere and sphere ! And 
see this about the Pleiades year, the great cycle counted out in 
the pyramid inches, a year to an inch, across these enormous 
diagonals ! And see this, about the lidless, empty coffer : why, 
it makes you think of the stone rolled away from the tomb ! 
And this, about Melchisedek being the builder of it all. And 
here at the end, the pyramid prophecy of the time coming, 
when people shall not suffer or go wrong any more under any 
sort of wrong ruling ! Are these things really what is meant, 
and are they meant in earnest, and do you understand 1 Why I 
if there is such a book in the world, why does n’t everybody 
know of it 1 And why are n’t we all starting for Egypt, to 


THE GREAT PYRAMID. 87 

make the beginning of the new world-nation, the People of the 
Great Pyramid 1 And what is a pyramid inch 1 ” 

It was a thorough woman’s rush of question, self-answering per- 
ception, impatient enthusiasm, and return to a very A, B, C 
of inquiry at the end. 

Rael smiled his odd, grave smile, and answered her last query 
but one, — her grand demand. He spoke as simply as if it had 
been something about his farm or his harvest. “To the ‘He- 
brews of the Hebrews,’ you know, Jerusalem is everywhere. 
Maybe that is why the pyramid is in the land-centre of the whole 
earth. It ’s a sign for the whole of it.” 

Then they turned the book over together, and he showed her 
some of the links, the reasonings, the numbers, — the things she 
meant when she had asked him “ did he understand,” and then 
had broken forth with what she had perceived without under- 
standing. He supplied to her elemental ignorance the pyramid- 
inch, the key to the mystical correspondence of the year-measure 
and sun-distance and earth-density, and so to the cosmic stand- 
ards set forth for line and time and cubic contents of all things, 
when all things shall be compared in pure truth and righteous- 
ness. 

“ And so the standards themselves are signs ! ” she exclaimed 
ardently. “And the pyramid does tell of the whole truth 
coming; because weights and measures aren’t so much, just 
for themselves. It’s the relation, the balance, the rule in 
everything that is sure to be worked out. Oh, I can’t say it, 
but it is glorious ! And the lidless coffer, the sarcophagus 
measure, is the measure of a man ; that is, of a man raised up ; 
that is, of an angel ! ” 

At this moment the Reverend Bernard Kingsworth walked 
into the dooryard. He heard the last quick sentence, and his 
eyes lighted up ; his whole face smiled, meeting that of the girl. 
When Bernard Kingsworth smiled, there was a wonderful 
shining. 

What shall I do ? He came, and they went on talking, catch- 
ing as they could the light that fell upon these mighty ideas. I 
should like you to hear something of what they said, but you 
will tell me, as I have been told before, that I “ sermonize,” 


88 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


that people don’t talk so every day. Granted ; but there are 
days, and there are people, and there are such golden grains in 
all the falling sands of common days, if we will only pick them 
up ; so that, for my part, I can no more tell a story of any real 
living and keep the word of life out of it than Mr. Dick could 
keep Charles the First’s head out of his memorial. So that, in 
consequence, they who care for my memorial must take the 
head with it, and maybe learn how it fits in, — in the influence 
and history of things. 

They talked, then, of the world measures ; of these densities 
and distances and motions, so exact, so related ; of the meas- 
ures in the making of everything ; of how the measures are the 
making — in music, in chemistry, in every art and science ; of 
the literal steps in creation, the ladder in the planet itself that 
geologists sound and climb by ; the Silurian, the sandstone, the 
chalk measures ; of the steps to an end that men can call by no 
other significant name, — legal measures, political measures, 
measures of prudence, of safety, of attainment, of understanding. 

“ True measure is true everything,” Mr. Kingsworth said. 
“ It is the very law of God. And so he puts his law into the 
least of men’s acts and dealings, that, learning and living 
it there, they may climb up to all knowledges and affections ; 
faithful in the least, the mere wheat measures, they shall come 
to live and rule among the greatest ; to handle divine causes, to 
take from God’s hand and build by his will. He building by them 
and in them the glory that is to be revealed. That is the prom- 
ise of the pyramid, written in stone. At the heart of it is 
man’s truth with his neighbor, the one fair measure for all with 
all. The whole of it tells the secrets of the stars.” 

“ There is another kind of measure,” said France thought- 
fully, “ the measure that the world seems most in a tangle 
about. There will have to be a great pyramid measure of 
things and people, — what they are worth in real comparisons. 
Those measures are all upside down, I think.” 

“ I think you touched that in what I heard you say as I came 
up. Miss Everidge,” said the minister. “ The measure of a 
man, — a man raised up ; that is, of an angel. The spiritual 
measure is the measure of a man, and of the things of a man. 
There is no other.” 


THE GREAT PYRAMID. 89 

“ And people never go by it, at least against the things that 
stand in sight.” 

“ Because man has made false signs, false values, and has let 
them stand for him. ‘ God sent a man with a measuring line 
in his hand ’ ‘ to measure Jerusalem ’ in the sight of the prophet. 
And he sent a message by another angel after him, ‘Deliver 
thyself, 0 Zion, that dwellest with the daughter of Baby- 
lon ! ’ ” 

“ There will have to be a great giving up, such as people will 
never agree to make, before it can be set right,” said France. 

“ Perhaps there is where the chief mistake is,” returned Mr. 
Kingsworth. “A great deal of giving up has been preached 
where giving 'place might have been truer. I must go back to 
Ezekiel again. He saw in the vision a Man whose appearance 
was as of brass ; he stood in the gate of a house, and he meas- 
ured all the building with the reed in his hand. All the little 
chambers and doorways and arches and pillars, and every least 
■part was in its place in the proportion of his measuring reed ; 
and the Great Gate looked toward the East, where the glory of 
God came in ; and at the end he said, ‘ Show the house to the 
House of Israel, that they may be ashamed of their iniquities, and 
let them measure the pattern. This is the law of the house ; 
upon the top of the mountain the vohole limit thereof shall be 
most holy. Behold, this is the law of the house.’ We do see 
persons here and there, I think. Miss Everidge, who measure 
life and things and people by the pyramid inch and cubit.” 

“ I thought of that,” said Israel, “ when I came across Miss 
Tredgold’s name here in the Book of the Pyramid.” 

“Miss Ammah’s!” France exclaimed, surprised. 

“Yes, exactly,” Rael answered, turning the leaves. “And I 
found the rest of it in the dictionary. ‘ Ammah ’ is ‘ the first, 
the foundation, the mother measure ’ ; and in the dictionary 
‘ Ammah ’ is ‘ abbess, or spiritual mother.’ ” 

“ Well,” remarked France consideringly, “ I should think 
Miss Ammah is a pyramid-inch woman. She does go for reali- 
ties, and reckons by foundation rules. But for an abbess, a spirit- 
ual mother, — I don’t think she is particularly sanctified.” 

“ Have n’t we just been finding out that righteous inches 


90 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


make the whole righteous stature and structure 1 ” asked the 
minister, smiling. “ I don’t doubt much about Miss Ammah’s 
sanctification. Would she be able to see me, do you think, this 
afternoon 1 ” 

France went up to ask. The minister and Eael Heybrook 
exchanged a word or two about her while she was gone. When 
she came back and invited Mr. Kingsworth to go up stairs with 
her, Rael stood still a minute, alone, and then went off to his 
milking. He was thinking — with two brown pails swinging 
from his two brown hands — of spiritual statures ; and some- 
thing occurred to him that was like a swift measuring of these 
statures in the man and the woman who had just left him, — 
that as a man and a woman should be in height and fair propor- 
tion to each other, Bernard Kingsworth and Frances Everidge 
were. 

Frances Everidge, in her northwest room, looking from her 
roof-window over the piazza, saw Rael with his milk-pails as he 
walked with head bent slightly down. She was half impatient 
of the other man, sitting there in the room beyond, in his nice 
clerical black, free to follow the profession he chose, free to 
study out the thoughts that attracted him. She was half jeal- 
ous that, with more prepared and perfect speech, he had even 
helped her just now to understand those splendid things. How 
modestly Rael Heybrook had given way to him ! Yet how 
clearly the young farmer had shown her, just before, about the 
pyramid-inch and the squared circle and the twenty-five-inch 
cubit ! 

“ He wants to be an engineer,” she was thinking to herself, 
while she watched the bent-down head and the old straw hat 
vanished from her clairvoyance, “ and he almost got to it. Well, 
he is one, if he does carry milk-pails. And I think engineering 
is the noblest thing in the world. It’s the power the world 
was made by. If the man-measure was only just set right, — ^ 
well, then I suppose we should measure even milk-pails differ* 
ently.” 


BRACKETS AND INTERLINES. 


91 


CHAPTER XI. 

BRACKETS AND INTERLINES. 

There came down a letter within a week after to Princeton, 
where Mrs. Everidge and the little ones were staying ; which, 
after reading, the mother sent, as family correspondence was 
accustomed to go around, to her elder girls at Magnolia and 
Mount Desert. At the bottom of the last written page, she 
put, in pencil, a “ 1 ”. It went from Helen to Euphemia with 
a “ ! ”, beneath the interrogation. But Euphemia, fast grow- 
ing to be the wise woman of the family, sent it back to her 
mother with this — “[ ]” — below them both. Now 

the reader shall have the much-annotated epistle, and make 
her own pointings upon it, or fill the brackets, as only readers 
can. 

“ My dear Mamma, — Miss Ammah is gaining splendidly. 
She has been twice to drive, and she has her hammock and her 
easy-chair upon the piazza now, and spends nearly all the day 
there. Do you know, I have found out what her very odd 
name means in the Hebrew 1 It is an ‘ original measure,’ the 
‘ mother-measure ’ of things. Is n’t that true of Miss Ammah’s 
judgments'? It is in a very curious book that they have 
here, and that I am reading now ; trying to read, I ought to 
say, for it is making great pretension to say just ‘reading it,’ 
as if it were any ordinary book, and I could ‘riddle it all out,’ 
as Sarell says, as fast as I can spell the words. Mr. Kings- 
worth, the minister, whose ‘Jerusalem sermon’ I told you 
about, lent it to Israel Heybrook, the farmer’s son. It seems 
queer that a farmer’s son should go into such things ; but he 
was beginning to be an engineer, and had to come back to help 
work out a debt on the farm. Mr. Kingsworth has explained 
some of it beautifully to us. He is very kind ; he often calls 


92 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


to see Miss Ammah, who knew him in Northampton, when he 
preached there. But I have n’t told you what the book is. 1 
hope they ’ll put it into the club, for our readings next winter, 
if we can only catch some mathematical professor to explain the 
calculations, and anybody the least bit able to tell the meanings 
as Mr. Kingsworth can. It ’s perfectly wonderful ; it would 
turn the world upside-down — I mean right-side up — if every- 
body could really and truly get hold of it. It ’s a whole Bible 
in stone ; ‘ a revelation in the only language that never has to 
be translated,’ Mr. Kingsworth says. It is called ‘ Our Inheri- 
tance in the Great Pyramid ’ ; but, of course, I can’t begin to tell 
you about it, only, every line and every measure and every bit of 
proportion in it, and its place on the globe, and its pointings to 
the stars, are true to some wonderful exactness of a fact, and 
that fact is true to everything under the sun ; and everything 
under the sun has got to be put in proportion to it some time 
or other, down to the milk-measures and the pound-weights. 
And when everything is weighed and measured right, inside 
and out, and put where it belongs, gi’eat-pyramid fashion, the 
millennium will have come. Mr. Kingsworth preached another 
grand sermon about it, from ‘Be ye perfect, as your Father in 
heaven is perfect.’ 

0 mamma, you ought all to come some time to Fellaiden. I 
don’t half dai-e to put it in your heads, for I feel as if we should 
have no right to come rushing in here upon Miss Ammah’s pre- 
emption ; but if you ever did come, you would want to come 
again, and to keep coming, and to keep staying. It is better 
than the White Mountains, because these mountains are so 
green and lovely to their very tops, and one does n’t put all the 
others out, as the White Hills do. You can look off among 
them and down among them, and the mists and the rains and 
the sunset colors go spilling and floating about in the valleys 
and hollows of them, and they are just singing with cascades 
when everything else is still. The Sundays are too exquisite 
for anything. I told you about the ride to the Centre, and how 
the Centre looks, just under the ridges of a great hill-circle, at 
this edge of it. Have I ever told you about the acre of maiden- 
hair! I have pressed hea-ps of it; a pile, between papers, a 


BRACKETS AKD INTERLINES. 


93 


yard high, up in the garret, with a board and four stones upon 
it to keep it down. And Israel Heybrook has brought some of 
the loveliest spleen-worts for us, from some way-ofi‘, rocky, 
brooky places where the farm goes, — dwarf and silvery spleen- 
worts ; I don’t think the girls have ever had any like them. 
The lilies are blossoming now in the ponds ; we have a bowl- 
ful on a stand here on the piazza. And there is a place 
quite near, where they say it will be blue with gentians ; and 
in another month or two, the maples will begin to turn, and 
then I am sure this Heybrook farm will be like some kind of a 
Sinbad or Aladdin country, with hills of precious stones and 
avenues of ruby and topaz columns. The very cow-lane is 
planted wdth sugar-maples, — a superb shade of a quarter of a 
mile, from the barns to the edges of the pine-woods. 

“ I should like to see all this in snow and ice, and to sleigh- 
ride up and down these pitches ! 

“ I would write you about the family, if I thought I could 
make you know them so. Helen would have to find something 
besides ‘ upper and under and middling,’ to class such people 
by. If our upper kind are on one height, these are on a height 
of their own. They are not ‘educated,’ at all, except the 
boys ; but they are pretty well ‘ brought out ’ by their living 
among these free, fresh things ; and the boys are brought out 
both ways. I think, mamma, we are apt to respect the things 
most people have, — their place or their money, or their good 
manners or their learning; but I certainly do respect these 
Heybrooks themselves. 

“ Miss Ammah thinks she shall stay until October. 

“ Love to papa and the little ones, to you all. I am glad 
you are all having such good times of your own. I should be 
just flying with fidgets to have mine without you, if you were n’t. 

. “ Your loving daughter, 

“ France.” 

It was certainly pretty well for general cheerfulness and ful- 
ness of accounting for it, considering the three weeks’ illness 
and watch just over. But it was over, and that always makes 
people glad ; also, that had been told in the time of it, when 


94 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


sickness and health bulletins were all that could be dispatched. 
Now the flowers and the ferns, and the maples and the moun- 
tains, crowded in. 

France .looked it over before she sent it off. She couldn’t 
help finding herself out just a little. She was conscious there 
were some things bracketed out. “ But of course I could n’t 
put everything into eight pages, even,” she said to herself. I 
think it hardly entered her head to begin at once, in such ne- 
cessarily slight and casual representation^ of things, upon pyra- 
mid-inch and proportion. 

Perhaps, if any but a Boston girl had written all that about 
the pyramid and the millennium, there would have been a 
family de lunatico to sit upon her. But the inquirendo here 
was as to the country minister, and what Miss Tredgold could 
be about — now that she was about — to let the affair — no, 
the possibility of an affair — go on ; no, not that, either, but 
even distantly threaten to begin. 

So Miss Tredgold received a letter presently, written with in- 
visible interlines, wherein, under merest friendlinesses and words 
of very gracious course, — little news of the other girls, and 
far-off sketching of winter plans, — there ran a tone of hint and 
caution : “ France is apt to go so furiously after one thing ; 
don’t let her study too deep into the mathematics and archae- 
ology she seems to have got hold of. I don’t want those head- 
aches to come back again.” And, “ I am so glad you are able 
for drives and little excursions again. France tells me of lovely- 
views and places that you so enjoy. I am thankful for her, 
too, I am sure. I don’t know what would become of her if she 
were shut up by your being shut up ; and of course she must de- 
pend upon you, as there seems to be no very suitable way for her 
to get about much without you.” Quite far on from that, mixed 
up with a quantity of mere mention, came, “I hope France 
does n’t bother that kind Mr. Kingwood too much. What a 
remarkable person he seems to be for such a perfectly out-of-the- 
way little parish ! And that reminds me, — would n't you both 
like to have some parcels of books from Boring’s 1 They come up 
here ; we exchange them once a fortnight by the express. I 
suppose you get the ‘ Atlantic ’ and the ‘ Transcript ’ regularly ? " 


BRACKETS AND INTERLINES. 


95 


Aud the postscript was, “ Do you really think you shall stay 
so late as into October! I shall be back for the little ones’ 
school by the fifteenth of September, perhaps earlier.” 

“Why don’t she say right out, ‘Keep the girl out of that 
minister’s way, and don’t let her ride round with the farmer’s 
sons ’ ? ” said Miss Ammah, who could n’t stand being dictated 
to, and who, if such a word had come, wo\ild have packed 
France off to Princeton by the next coach and train, although 
she knew there was no room for her there, and it would be an 
utter break with France and her family. But she liked the 
girl, and she could ignore the hints ; so she only had it out with 
herself in a sharp soliloquy, which she ended with a laugh. 
“ Perhaps if she knew of the Kingsworths of Montreal,” she 
said, “ and that old General Kings worth, the uncle, was worth 
his half million, and only this namesake-nephew and a niece to 
leave it to, she ’d scruple less about the ‘ bother,’ and might 
make out to remember his name right.” Here the laugh came 
out loud, and France heard it in the next room, and asked what 
it was about, of course ; for in this curious world nobody can 
ever laugh, any more than they can shriek, without accounting 
for it. And the pyramid-inch woman only said, looking out of 
the window for an escape, “The old gray cropple-crowm has 
coaxed one of the buff hen’s chickens over the fence again, and 
Mrs. Buff has flown after her, and pulled the best feather right 
out of her cap. She looks awfully meek without it. It ’s dread- 
ful to be a disappointed old cropple-crown, and to have to go 
about borrowing other hens’ chickens ! ” 

But if she spoke in parables made to her hand for wisdom’s 
sake, she talked straight enough to herself, without any para- 
ble at all. 

“ I wonder what the girl has written to set them out ! And I 
wonder how far I aw responsible ! ” she asked inwardly. “Am 
I to go right away with the child, because here is a man in a 
black coat and another in his shirt-sleeves, who may, either one 
of them, get the Avorst of it! for I don’t believe France will, 
any way. But, then, how could I tell what might happen on 
the very journey! There are all sorts of railroad accidents. 
No; I’m on my own straight course, and everybody else is on 


96 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


theirs ; she ’s here with me, with advice and consent, and the 
rest belongs to Providence, and the steering of those whom it 
concerns. It’s part of the history of France, too; and France 
is old enough to take care of her own politics. I ’ve no right to 
stave off any of her experience. If I thought Rael would suffer, 
— that ’s what did trouble me, but here steps in the minister 
to cure him. Rael ’s giving way already ; and Rael is n’t a fool, 
to give up his own, even his own in his own heart, if he knew 
it. His own may be on the road : France Everidge is just 
showing him that it is n’t here, among these Fellaiden girls. If 
France should take the minister, — I mean if Bernard Kings- 
worth would take her, — I know how that would be reconciled 
fast enough. And if it was written, beyond my foresight and 
without my planning, that the other could possibly be, why, it 
would be the Lord’s doing, and it would n’t be so marvellous in 
my eyes that I could n’t fall in with it. No,” she added, as if 
by a suggestion that reached farther, “ nor be an accessory after 
the fact, if Providence signified that it wanted me. I don’t owe 
an atom of accountability to any scare of worldly calculation 
against Providence. And yet, it does make an old cropple- 
crown feel fussy to get another hen’s chicken over the fence, 
and then see it runuing under the brambles.” 

With such reasoning and the present necessity. Miss Ammah 
quieted herself, and the history of France went on. 

France had found herself out just thus far : that the many 
speculations she was conscious of concerning this anomalous 
young farmer-gentleman — for it was the question of the rec- 
oncilability of such a term that kept coming up to her — were 
not at all submitted, or allowed their relative place, in what she 
had written home of the Fellaiden people. Still, it was only one 
of the sort of puzzles that always had puzzled her, and that at 
home they never entered into the least bit ; on the contrary, 
they would be sure to “think things that had no sense in 
them ” if she mentioned it. What the precise things without 
sense were, in her mind, she did not stop to sound for ; she 
only said sturdily, “Of course, it ’s nothing to me, anyway ; but 
I should like to understand a little better the queer world I ’va 
been born into.” 


THE RED QUARKIES. 


97 


CHAPTER XII. 

THE RED QUARRIES. 

Miss Ammah grew quite strong. The great three weeks’ 
haying was just over : there was a lull in farm-work and 
house-work. Miss Ammah wanted to get over to Reade, fif- 
teen miles, to have a dentist there do some slight mending for 
her teeth. Mrs. Hey brook also wanted to go, to “ trade a 
little ” at the shops. To be sure, she could send for her cali- 
coes by Mrs. Clark, who would be going over Monda}’, and 
so save her own time ; and Rael could just drive Miss Ammah 
in the buggy; but Sarell said with force, “You know Miss 
Clark hain’t got no sort of judgment and she ain’t the most 
reliable woman in the world, any way, nor in the town either ! 
I won’t trust her with my arrants ! ’’ 

Besides, the “ Red Quarries ” were on the way ; and Miss 
France wanted to see the Red Quarries, where they found the 
pink tourmaline and the rose-quartz. So all these things and 
the pleasant weather settled it. Rael was to drive the two 
horses in the double-seated wagon, and Miss Ammah and his 
mother and Miss France were to go. 

They started early, when the dew was still bright in the 
shady places, and the sweet pasture-perfumes were just rising 
up in the sunny ones. The glory of the blue overhead was 
only flecked by softest silvery foam of clouds that floated joy- 
ously upon the high-moving mountain airs. Everything was 
as clean and beautiful and glad as life was with the two 
freshest of heart and years among them. The big, plain 
mountain-wagon, with its red wheels, its hard seat-back, softened 
with rugs and robes flung over, rumbled along jollily after the 
sure-stepping, comfortable old horses. France sat in front with 
Rael. The long summer day, of which this beauty was the 


98 


ODD, OR EVEN V 


beginning, was before them. The Inncheon-baskets, packed with 
the best “victuals” from Mother Heybrook’s pantry, were un- 
der the box. They were to stop at the Quarries, a mile this 
side the edge of Reade, get their stones, and eat their dinner ; 
for the dinners at the Reade taverns were what Mrs. Heybrook, 
with her housewifely ability that was opposite inability, called 
“ unaccountable.” 

When we all know what summer days do, — what pleasure 
shared is to young creatures making up their vision of life 
from the fairest that life presents; when we remember the town 
pleasures, — the hops, the assemblies, the concerts, the Germans, 
that bring young folks together, and what the beginning of 
one of these evenings is to the youths and maidens who meet 
with gloves just drawn on, flowers fresh in the hand, and the 
band-music sounding its first notes in their ears, — can’t we 
think what, in the same nature of things, this all-day, world- 
wide ecstasy was, as it began with France Everidge and Rael 
Heybrook 1 They could n’t have been young man and young 
girl, and not have felt some thrill of it, different from what it 
would have been without each other. Something of comparison 
with those hothouse pleasures of the winter and society-time was 
suggesting itself to France; and she thought eagei’ly, “Oh, what 
bigger things there are than little lighted rooms and a few florist’s 
bouquets and exactly eight pieces of music with set strains ! and 
how much bigger 'people seem, let loose with all this to make their 
work or pleasure in ! ” She turned around on her seat, and said 
to Miss Ammah, “ I ’m afraid I can never crowd a real good 
time inside brick walls again, now that I ’ve had all creation for 
one single treat ! ” And Israel, holding the reins loosely over 
his knee as his big horses grappled up the Centre Hill, smiled 
that the grand divertisement was just a country ride that he 
could give anybody, any time, always, — when the great hay- 
harvest was not actually amaking. They went by the river 
road, down through the wild, black glen, from which the cedar- 
clad heights rose straight and steep at either side, along the 
ledge-winding, whence they looked over into the shine and foam 
of noisy little cataracts, across broad meadow-stretches, where 
the blossoms of the aiTowhead sheeted as with snow the beau- 


THE RED QUARRIES. 


99 


tiful level ; and here Rael put the reins into France’s hands, 
sprang down, and over the low, broken wall, gathered handfuls 
of the delicate flow'era with their spear-pointed leaves, and came 
back and heaped them all into the girl’s lap. That was n’t a 
thing that could be done in any “ German figure ” or in any 
drawing-room. 

The pleasure brimmed up and up. The high noon found 
them in the cool, deep ledges where the quarry road began. 
They came around under the flank of a mighty hill, crossed into 
a low defile, scrambled up a cart-track over rattling stones, 
brook-washed by the spring currents ; and in a cheerful opening, 
where oaks and maples made a marginal ring, they stopped 
the horses, climbed down from the wagon, made their little 
camping-place, and forgot that they were bound any whither 
from any where, or ever back again, and that this lovely still- 
ness was not the very emptiness of all the world of everything 
but joy and beauty, and themselves its sole delighters. 

Away up in the hills, in these gray and green solitudes, 
everything is everybody’s, — everybody’s who knows where it 
is and what it means when they come to it. Of course, you 
can’t quarry in a man’s owned and titled ledges, or cut his 
woods down ; but “ all creation for a treat,” from the huckleber- 
ries on the bushes and the fair, odoi’ous azaleas in the wild, dark 
swamps, to the crystals of garnet and amethyst that you may 
pick up among the clefts of granite, and the glory of all the 
unforbidden range of earth and sky, belongs to these farmer 
people, whose hearts and souls sometimes grow great and sweet 
toward such fulness, though shut out and cut off from the bor- 
rowed culture of the towns. Rael Heybrook was a prince 
to-day, showing his inheritance — the things he had had essen- 
tial ownership in from boyhood — to these his guests, — to 
France Everidge, her face radiant with the joy that beat 
through her veins like new blood, her step springing with 
eagerness as she followed him on and on, greedy to gather in 
to-day all this big mountain and its splendors, for sight and 
memory at least, to carry away with her, and keep a “joy 
forever.” 

Miss Ammah began to quiver in her conscience again, sitting 


Lore. 


100 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


there in enforced rest with Mother Heybrook among the 
maples ; but this day, at any rate, was beyond her snatching 
back again. 

In the low brushwood under the hill they found the lovely 
rosy azalea, late-blooming in a cool, rock-shaded hiding-place, 
and the fair, white, spicy blossoms of the commoner kind. They 
filled their emptied lunch-baskets with them, packing their stems 
in dripping mosses. Then they addressed themselves to the 
search for jewels. It was like a fairy tale. 

Up rose the high cone of the bristling, scrub-wooded hill, 
veined mightily with its one broad heaving line of outcropped 
granite, like a lava stream. Up this they had to climb, to cross 
the crest, to clamber down beyond into the open quarries, where 
the gray seams with their white flashes, and the wide-strewm 
heaps of quartz and feldspar fragments, with glistening films and 
solid plates of mica catching the sun’s rain of light and flinging 
it back in piercing, scintillant intensity, lay like one great moun- 
tain geode broken apart before them. 

They found their red tourmaline, their bits of garnet, sheets 
of violet-colored mica, above all the rosy masses of mother-rock 
and the clear white obelisks of crystal, that groixped themselves 
like little fallen pillars, a miniature primeval ruin. France 
came back with her gown full, the overskirt gathered up across 
her arm, with a weight that threatened to break through the 
staff, wild with delight, and calling to Miss Ammah that Mr. 
Rael had as many as he could carry in her shawl for her, 
Miss Ammah’s self. “ They ’ll fill a whole cabinet,” she said, 
“ Why, you don’t know ! You can’t conceive ! We ’ve beer 
to an actual Golconda ! ” 

“Well,” said Miss Ammah a little bit tartly, as she rose 
rather stiffly from her long low posture, “ I think now we a 
better go to Reade.” 

She had half a mind to say she wanted to ride in front her- 
self now, above the horses ; but that would have been ridiculous. 
They knew so altogether better about her usual mind in regard 
to horses, and that her only peace was to sit behind, forgetting 
the eight legs, and merely watching placidly the four involun- 
tary wheels. Just as they were going into Reade, besides ! No, 


THE EED QUARRIES. 


101 


this day, in all its circumstance, was beyond her snatching back 
again. Poor Miss Ammah, — who had given things over confi- 
dently to Providence and the parties concerned ! She did not 
yet know what this day was to do that could not in a hurry be 
snatched back or got away with into safer days. 

It was the first time Rael and France had been so thrown 
together. If the minister had been there, as he had been in 
their pyramid readings, their star-gazing in the warm, bright 
evenings, going out and in between the planisphere under the 
parlor lamp and the round of heaven all visible from the ridge 
of silent roadway out before the door ! Both together, she felt 
no dread of them ; one at a time, and this one, it began first to 
look momentous. 

To Rael and France nothing that they knew had altered. 
They had not talked very much, they had been so busy and 
so happy. He had thought once and again, seeing her pleasure, 
her bright looks, her quick movements, “ How simple and how 
glad she is ! ” and France had set down a fresh item in the slow 
estimate she fancied she was making of him, simply as that 
farmer-gentleman she must account for to allow. “ He is as 
fond of beautiful things as if he had to buy them, instead of 
finding them in the rocks and woods. I wonder if that is n’t 
something gentle-born 1 ” 


102 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


CHAPTER XIII. 

HOW MUCH MORE DOES IT TAKE ? 

It was in the evening, the sweet dusk-edge, as they drove slowly 
back from Reade. 

They had taken the long river road in the morning, eighteen 
miles by the way of the north-side quarries. They were coming 
home by the cross-road now. 

They had got to the crown of hills above “Jerusalem,” 
and were descending, with careful reining in and bearing back, 
the steep, long plunges, — for these mountain roads are like 
cataract beds, and travellers are like the falling water, — where 
the only break and safety \vere the water-bars, humping up 
across the way at frequent intervals. 

Midway down, — a crack, a lurch, — a sudden huddling of 
harness, wagon, horses. 

They did not know till afterward what happened, or how 
they got safe out of it. There was only that quick conscious- 
ness of the instant upon which people act half blindly, yet 
oftentimes as from a preternatural clear-seeing. 

Something had given way ; they were all in a loose, clattering 
heap : there was the second’s pause before the inevitable rush, 
and the terrible remainder of the hill was before them. Rael, 
with a brave shout to his horses, was out over the dashboard, 
lighting on the heavy pole between their struggling haunches, 
the reins still gathered in his hands. The iron-hooked end of 
the pole struck fast against the water-bar, burying itself ' in the 
hard earth ; that held them back an instant. The wise beasts, 
feeling their master and his manhood down there with them in 
their very work and peril, and recognizing the beginning of the 
help, held their own nobly for an instant more. In the self- 
same flashes of time the three women had been out at back and 


HOW MUCH MORE DOES IT TAKE? 


103 


sides, France over the high forward step with one qnick spring. 
Then the girl had seized up a great stone, and crowded it chock 
against the grinding, slipping wheel, — another, two more then ; 
the elder women seeing what was to do and hurrying to help 
with it. Nobody spoke a word till all was fast. 

Rael unhitched his horses : some strap or staple had given 
way and parted the neckyoke from the pole ; it was only his 
quick spring upon the tongue that had checked the downward 
plunge, and hung their safety on the bit of timber and his hun- 
dred and sixty pounds of weight. France, sitting there on the 
rough roadside bank, watching what he was doing now, and ask- 
ing nothing, understood it all. He was tying the yoke with a 
bit of rope, winding it fast about the pole, that fortunately was 
not broken. He stood between the horses’ heads, quietly intent 
upon his work ; Mrs. Heybrook and Miss Tredgold were dusting 
each other’s gowns. France said to herself, remembering the leap 
down among those scrambling hoofs, before the threatening 
crush of the wheels, “ He is as brave as a lion ! How much 
more does it take, I wonder 1 ” 

Wise with man’s beginning wisdom, and growing wiser ; gentle 
as a woman with care and tendance ; beauty-loving as a child ; 
quick and strong, and full of courage, not counting his life, or 
his life’s plan, dear unto him against the need of others. How 
much more, indeed 1 How much more did she know anybody 
to be 1 

But he had grown up out of the ground ; had come up like a 
turnip, with the soil clinging to him. 

Did she say that to herself? Not at all ; it was said as if be- 
hind her. She had now to reason, not with herself, who had 
always run counter, in a girlish fashion, to the prejudices of her 
class and narrow circle, — or rather of the class and narrow 
circle which stands censor to the imagination of a wider class 
seeking to press within a smaller limit ; she had to reason with 
what, in spite of herself, stood censor over her now, from habit 
of appeal, of control, of very resistance. And all in behalf, 
quite objectively, of this instance, this fact of human nature, 
and a special condition, which was to be fairly measured and 
then maintained. 


104 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


Grown ? come up 'i Had he quite done that 1 was he half, yet, 
of what he would be, must be, before he could be measured 1 
was he not — the disputed wmrd came back to her — merely 
middling, as yet 1 If this were half height, what was the full 
stature 1 was it anything she had known much of, except in 
story-dreams 1 Was it any gentleman’s measure that she had 
come close enough to, in her small, school-girl, party-going ex- 
perience, to look up at 1 A great many gentlemen’s measures 
were simply kept at their tailors’. It was the measure of some- 
thing she knew of in men who spoke and acted for their kind. 
Gentlemen, not of mere order or family, but nobles of a race. 
Meanwhile this noble had mended his tackle in such fashion as 
he could. 

Miss Tredgold was demoralized, and could not be assured 
that the mending would hold, or if it did, that the old wagon’s 
time had not come and it would not go to pieces, bit by bit, 
between here and the farm, down all those awful bam-roof 
pitches. Insanely, though quietly, she declared an intention 
of walking. Two miles and a half of barn-roof pitches, and she 
the very one of the party who could not do two miles and a 
half of fair walking. 

Rael offered to lead the horses, and so lighten the weight, 
besides keeping control. She would rather not. The only 
way, then, was to start on in company with her, and take her 
up when her muscles gave out and her nerves gave in. France 
would walk with her, and Mother Heybrook and Rael would 
ride. 

But at that instant it was found out that France could not 
walk. She had sat still on the bank, not mentioning what she 
had thought would go off of itself, — a little pain in her knee 
from her jump. Apparently, it had gone off by resting ; but 
when she rose to her feet she dropped back again with a slight 
cry. There was a twist ; she could not bear her weight. She 
laughed, her brows knit at the same time with the aching. 

They all started toward her. Rael came to her first. “ You 
are hurt,” he said ; “and you saved us from the whole danger. 
Is it very bad 1 ” 

“1 1 how can you tell such a — contortion 1 Do you suppose 

8 


HOW MUCH MORE DOES IT TAKE? 105 

we shall ever forget seeing you go down there into that great 
heap of hunching, scrambling creatures 1 ” she spoke in the safe, 
dignified plural, though nobody had seen him at all but herself, 
until it was pretty well over. “You might have been dragged 
away, — run over, — crushed,” 

“ Yes, if you had not blocked the wheels,” said Rael quietly. 
“ Is it very bad 1 ” 

“What is it, France?” asked Miss Ammah. “Can’t you 
get up 1 What shall we do ? ” 

Rael saw what ; and he did it, just as he had jumped down 
between the horses. He put forth two strong arms, gathered 
France and her draperies all up, folding her shawl about her, 
as lightly and easily as a nurse gathers up a baby ; and hold- 
ing her so, went up step and thill and footboard, as a nurse 
might climb an even stair. He set her down softly, where she 
had sat before ; then with two baskets, a cushion from his side 
of the wagon-seat, and a rug from the back, he made a level 
with the dashboard ; took her two little feet, not asking which 
was the lame one, and rested them both across it ; rolled a 
cloak up in the corner for her to lean against ; then he said, 
“ Now, mother, — now. Miss Ammah, — we must get home.” 

And with that, up drove the minister, in his light buggy, 
from a bit of cross-road that came in just ahead. 

There was room for one with him : Miss Ammah had better 
go ; she would not be afraid, and she would get home first, and 
the large load would be lightened. She need not worry about 
Miss France : Rael would walk down all the pitches, and lead 
the horses. 

There was no taking France down again ; there was no use 
making any more fuss. Miss Ammah felt the hands of Provi- 
dence grasping her on every side, and gave way, mentally wash- 
ing her own. Mentally, underneath all her scruples, repeating 
to herself, “ If they are man and woman enough to find each 
other out, all Boston could n’t help it if it was here. And per- 
haps I ’m more accountable to what I know about them both 
as man and woman than I am to what all Boston would think 
about them, not knowing at all. If I could n’t in conscience be 
toward, I could n’t in nature be from-ward — that ’s froward. 


106 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


— in it ; especially when I ’m set right outside it all, as I am 
this minute. Besides which, here ’s the other.” 

The other was breaking up the thread of her self-examination 
by persistent inquiries, — about the accident, about the hurt 
Miss Everidge had sustained, about anything he could possibly 
do for them all. Doctor Fargoodl He would drive over to 
the railway village and fetch him, with pleasure. Wouldn’t it 
be \frell to go right on, when he should have left her at the 
farm 1 The doctor would be back almost as soon as Miss Ever- 
idge would have arrived herself. And with that he whipped 
up his little Morgan at the brow of a descent, so that Miss 
Tredgold screamed in a whisper, as was always her discreet 
way in her driving frights, and besought him to hold back. 

They would wait and see. It might be nothing. Arnica 
would be the first thing, any way. There could be nothing 
very serious, or she could not have rushed round blocking the 
wheels, when she first jumped off. 

“ Did she do that 1 It was great presence of mind.” 

“ It was great presence of stones, anyway. And it was natural 
enough to put them to their obvious use,” Miss Tredgold an- 
swered serenely ; for the Morgan was going comfortably on a 
safer level now, and a suspension of terror always made her 
slightly jocose. 

Mr. Kingsworth w'as reconciled to waiting at the farm a 
little while to see. 

But it was Israel Heybrook who lifted her down, as he had 
lifted her up, and carried her in his arms straight up the stairs, 
and laid her on the sofa in Miss Ammah’s room, and there 
delivered her over to that lady. He scarcely questioned, or 
expressed much of concern ; by his quietness he showed the 
respectful distance that he felt, even holding her that way, 
through necessity, in his very arms ; and he did not think of 
crossing the threshold with her into her own apartment. 

But he went down stairs and led his team around to the 
barns, feeling as if some great, new thing had happened to him, 
and he did not dare to look at it to see what it was. 

In the kitchen, Sarell, in her peculiar way, was approaching 
a fresh subject with Mrs. Heybrook. “ Things alwers happens 


HOW MUCH MORE DOES IT TAKE? 


107 


all of a heap,” she said ; “ and I don’ know whether I ’d best 
tell yer or not. Here’s France goin’ to be laid up lame, an’ 
waited on (Sarell was too much born in tne American purple to 
miss any of her own dignity by ‘ Missing’ anybody else whom 
she ever heard spoken of without a nominal prefix) ; and here ’s 
Tr 3 ’^phosy Clark ben after you, as she alwers does when she 
comes to a jog, or thinks she doos ; and I s’pose likely she ’ll 
expect word from yer somehow, if yer can’t go. 1 hope the' 
ain’t goin’ to be fever round. Miss Tredgold ’s jest got through, 
an’ now here ’s ’Lando Clark. Tryphosy said there warn’t 
nothin’ to be scared of, an’ that ’s how 1 know. I know Try- 
phosy. I presume the doctor told her right out ’t was typ’us.” 

“ Can’t j'ou ever think well of Tryphosy again, Sarell 1 
Life ’s too short for querrellin’ and suspectin’,” said Mrs. Hey- 
brook, reaching down hat and shawl that she had just hung up 
in the press. “If Orlando’s sick, I must step down. I s’pose 
you can help up stairs, if they want anything ; I ’ll run up and 
find out. And you can see to the tea.” 

“I know life’s too short fer querrellin’,” Sarell responded, 
her fresh face, with its sunshine of blue-sparkling, good-natured 
eyes, its beaminess of red-gold, wavy hair, and complexion 
suiting, its mouth, untaught as j’et to drop its corners, in 
curious contradiction to the humor of her speech. “ But it ’s 
too short, too, fer makin’ over some folks. An’ yer could n’t 
make up with Trj’phosy Clark athout ye could make her over. 
She ’s right there, same ’s she ever was, an’ will be t’ the end 
o’ the chapter. And that means she ain’t anywheres ter be 
depended on. She ’ll melt over last year’s sugar an’ sell it fer 
ne-ew, an’ she’ll give short weight of butter an’ cheese, an’ 
she ’ll borrer big and return small, an’ she ’ll lie the charickter 
all out o’ the house, finally, as she ’s lied away Silas Clark’s good 
name aready, with her contraptions. He’s a clever-disposed 
kind ’ver man, nat’rilly, ef he could only git shet o’ her tricks ; 
an’ he ’s ben a ri’down good husbin’ to her ; that is, as good ’s a 
man knows how to be. Yiss, I kin see ter tea an’ clear away ; 
but I can’t reconcile it, your goin’ down there. It’ll run all 
through the family, — everything alwers doos run through that 
family, — an’ it ’ll start on yourn ; fer you ’ll be down yerself.” 


108 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


“ Don’t borrow trouble, Sarell,” Mrs. Hey brook said placidly 
moving toward the stairs, 

“ Why not ? ” Sarell called after her, in a brisk and cheerful 
manner. “ There ’ll be plenty to pay back with, ef we all liv’ ’n 
prosper ! ” Then she turned to her waiting work again ; put a 
handful of chips into the stove, set the tea-pot and the griddle 
back, and gave a fresh whip-up to the bowl of flapjack 
batter. 

She had spoken her mind : that always cheered her up in 
the very process, so that the last end of a tirade or a lamenta- 
tion became quite genial or jolly. Also, she never projected 
her grievances into surroundings that had nothing to do with 
them; she never slammed innocent doors or dealt recklessly 
with irrelevant crockery; she never gloomed at the next person 
because the last one had worried her. “ There ain’t no need to 
cut your bread with a knife you’ve jest ben peelin’ onions 
with.” That was her idea, and she stood up to it. 


MOUNTAIN-FOGS, ETC. 


109 


CHAPTER XIV. 

MOUNTAIN-FOGS AND CLEAR-RUNNING WATERS. 

Well, and the history of France? 

In the days that followed the laming of her knee, it was a 
history of the interior mostly. Foreign relations were in statu 
quo. For ten days she was keeping her room ; she could not 
walk over the stairs, and, of course, she would not now be car- 
ried. The doctor had prescribed a three weeks’ rest, as nearly 
entire as might be ; the ten days’ perfect passivity he had in- 
sisted on : after the three weeks he promised her activity again. 
She read ; she painted some flowers and ferns ; she sewed and 
crocheted a little ; she thought a great deal. Never a word 
she said about her coming home that night, or Rael Heybrook’s 
service in it. She had taken it at the time in utter passivity 
and almost utter silence. Twice she had said the decent 
“ Thank you ” ; the second time it was “ Thank you very 
much ” : she could not say less. But it was spoken with perfect 
quietness ; she would not for worlds have seemed embarrassed 
about it, or treated it as a thing in itself for particular feeling 
or notice. She would by no means have resented it ; it was 
the only thing to be done ; and if not resentment, what other 
imaginable emotion could it have provoked in her? Could? 
That was the question in the tone she chose to take, even with 
herself; but in spite of her tone, there was another more search- 
ing : what had it ? 

The war was brought home, now ; it was no longer an argu- 
ment for an opinion against the standards of the world : it was 
a struggle within herself. It exasperated her, because, accord- 
ing to her theories, there had no business to be a struggle at 
all. If this man were a gentleman, why not, with a womanly 
shyness, yet with a wojnanly truth, own to herself that those 


IIU 


ODl). OR EVEN V 


moments of dependence upon his strength, his promptitude, hia 
delicate, bold chivalry of help, had been moments to her of a 
secret, beautiful joy, — joy, that fora woman there was in the 
world this manly power and kindness ; joy, that to this woman, 
herself, this manly man should render itl She was angry, 
ashamed; she was furious, disgusted with hei-self : but she 
could not deny it. She only would not look at it. She beat 
her own thought down, smiting it in the face. 

And all this, while she placidly waited and passed her time in 
little feminine resources, seeming to miss nothing, to be impa- 
tient' for nothing, to remember nothing. Miss Ammah laughed 
at herself in these days, for her anxieties of the weeks ago. 

Mrs. Heybrook would wait on the young lady; she would 
leave her ironing, her baking, her butter-working, to bring her 
letters from the morning mail, a book that Mr. Kingsworth had 
left, a plateful of fresh, crisp caraway-cakes, a glass of cold yel- 
low buttermilk from the iced churn. Miss Ammah begged her 
not ; she insisted on carrying up the trays herself for regular 
meals ; but there was always just this thing that the good woman 
“ thought she might as well step right up with.” She was also 
stepping down to the Clarks’. 

There was fever there : Orlando was tediously, though not 
dangerously ill ; then Emily was down with it, and badly. 
Tryphosy Clark was no nurse ; she was only a rub-and-go house- 
keeper; she never had things handy, or thought of them if 
they were at hand. Mother Heybrook was everything and had 
everything ; there is always one such woman in a country neigh- 
borhood, upon whom the neighborhood hangs. 

“ Mother ” began to look pale. The hot days, — on her feet 
from four in the morning ; the short, half-resting nights, at 
last some nights of watching, when Emily Clark died ; then 
the funeral, for which she had to put her shoulder to the 
wheel, to straighten the house, after she had straightened the 
corpse in it, — these, one after and upon the other, wore upon 
her. “Father” saw it; but all he could do w'as to keep the 
mare tackled up, so as to “slip her down to Clarks’ as well as 
not,” and slip down after her when she was ready to come 
home; to look, mildly anxious, in her white face, and say. 


MOUNTAIN-FOGS, ETC- 


111 


“Don’t go too fur, mother; take care of yourself”; or, “Too 
bad, mother ; all beat out, I know.” “ But it was no use to 
contradict ; marm was a pretty resolute kind of a woman.” 

Israel noticed it ; and he got the milk strained and set away, 
while Sarell w^ashed tea-things and scalded pails, so that the 
willing girl’s hands were in the bread-trough before “ mother ” 
came back from her neighborly kindness, the nights she did 
come back ; and there was nothing further left for even her 
scrupulousness to “see to.” Rael even got hold of the hot 
irons when Mrs. Heybrook had to leave them for the dinner- 
getting, and polished sheets and pillow-cases and table-cloths 
with his big strength and careful handling. 

The Clarks lived down in the hollow ; the meadow mists 
hung there, and the dank, odorous vegetation of the brookside 
and the swampy ground brewed subtle malaria “ some years.” 
Up on the hillside, it was clear and dry and wholesome-balmy. 
The natures of the people were like their dwelling-places. 
Mother Heybrook kept her nature with her everywhere ; and 
she came up from the hollow and the sickness, through the 
clear pasture breezes, to her high, sweet-aired home ; and she 
held out well. But there came a day, — however, a good 
many other days came between, and I have to tell of them. 

The books came up from Loi’ing’s ; some lovely worsted- work, 
begtin and colors sorted, from Stearns’s ; fruit and more solid 
delicacies in baskets and ice-hampers : for Mr. Everidge spent 
his week-days in town, and the whole family were devising com- 
forts and amusements for France, now that she was laid up and 
away from them all. I told you they were nice people, although 
they were middling in some things; and France was a good 
deal to them, though she was the middle girl of five. Perhaps 
they pulled with a little unusual vigor at family ties, just now, 
from a dim fear of other pulling — of other, scarce-possible, but 
dreadful-to-be-contemplated hard knots. 

France rejoiced in the dainties, by means of which she could 
do a little part in Mother Heyhrook’s good work ; could also 
beguile Mother Heybrook herself into a little daintier living 
than ordinai'y. 

She made up charming lesser baskets and dishes, garnished 


112 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


with ferns and vine-leaves, and had them ready at the door 
when Mrs. Heybrook, or a messenger from her, was setting off ; 
and she had some fresh device and deliciousness in the middle 
of the homely Heybrook family table, out in the shady “ long 
kitchen,” when the tired good lady came home. 

One thing was noticeable, that she chose her moments ; and 
that it was to Lyman or his mother, if possible, that she in- 
trusted her sendings ; she was hardly ever, by any chance, in 
the Heybrook family limits when Israel was there. 

Within the fortnight she had recovered far enough to get up 
and down the stairs by aid of the balusters, and quite com- 
fortably about the house; but she had not ventured beyond the 
threshold further than into the front porch or upon the sunset 
piazza, at hours when Miss Ammah and she could have their 
places to themselves, — so far, that is, as the farm people were 
much concerned ; the minister did drop in now and then, on his 
way to and from the village, and usually found them outside. 

Rael Heybrook sufficiently seconded her desire — if desire 
it were — to keep aloof ; he busied himself more energetically 
than ever with his farm work and plans, which now took him 
to the distant borders of the property. He was surveying some 
irregular boundaries, and was cutting down a piece of woodland, 
the timber of which he was to haul seven miles to the railroad 
station at Creddle’s Mills, when the sledding came. For that 
he calculated to realize a good winter’s profit. 

These were some of the days between that I spoke of ; they 
were between parts in several connections of my story, — the 
more, not the less, reason to follow their quiet lines ; for noth- 
ing ever stays exactly where it was, in days that come between. 

It was in this time, as France regained the slight beginnings 
of her liberty, which were yet such mere enlargements of im- 
prisonment, and as she seemed rather contentedly to accept and 
adhere to their limits, that Bernard Kingsworth came into 
nearer opportunities of knowing her ; of contact with her 
thought and character in such ways as make days like weeks, 
and weeks like years, either for the friendships and drawings 
together, or the antagonisms and ploughing of great gulfs, in 
our human, which are our eternal, relations. 


MOUNTAIN-FOGS, ETC. 


113 


The young minister had always been in the habit of calling 
a good deal, in a quite friendly and casual way, — the chances 
playing in with, if not originating often in, the friendliness, as 
they never would have done in an unsuited or indifferent ac- 
quaintance, — on Miss Ammah, in her abidings at the farm. 
His way to and from the village, when he did not take to the 
river-path and the woods, lay over the hill ; and he was often the 
bearer of the “ forest mail,” that came in by night, after the day 
mail had been received and brought to them at the regular 
twilight hour. 

Mr. Kingsworth never deliberately — as Mr. Everidge might 
have said in regard to his own sort of business subjects — 

talked shop ” ; that is, he never talked the technicalities of 
his profession, or treated of religion as a commodity ; he never 
came, of purpose prepense, in his character of minister; I should 
say, upon an errand as preacher. He left his gown in the pulpit, 
as Miss Ammah had remarked of him when she had first met 
him ; though, literally or metaphorically, he wore no pulpit 
gown at all, anywhere ; certainly not among these barehanded, 
common-vestured farmer people who were his hearers. 

Yet what was in the man came forth from his lips, if he 
talked at all, inevitably ; as the merchant, studying trade and 
the world, though he may not utter invoices or the monetary 
returns of the day, will yet by his view and grasp of things, 
whatever they may be, show the point and hold he has in com- 
mand of what the world concerns with, and be still the man 
of wide relations and economies in all that he handles and dis- 
cusses. In his very avoidances, as much ; as wife and daugh- 
ters, busy with their small social or personal detail, quite often 
experience. The eye and the ear of a man, and, of necessity, 
the natural speech, which feeds itself through eye and ear, 
are open to and opened by the range in which his working 
power puts forth ; and he directly and consciously, or in- 
sensibly and by side-drift, first comes to his choice of tools 
and craft, and then fashions all he does, his very thoughts 
and internal manhotTd, with the habit of his calling and to 
the quality and uttemiost intention of that which he has taken 
up to do. 


114 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


The carpenter at Nazareth — the Son of the Builder, like David 

— was ill truth the very Builder of the world. 

So, if I try to bring you into these pleasant, unhampered, 
summer-day companionships, where were met together a young 
nature, new to life, and asking questions of it and of itself, — 
a conversant womanhood that had shared and observed the 
world with keenness for seeing and strength for experience, 

— and a man’s power and training, directed, of the highest joy 
and purpose, toward true interpretations of that which is writ' 
ten, not between any two covers only, but between the covers 
that are put as the upper and the lower waters of the firmament, 
and hold the world of the creation and its working, — that is, 
all living meanings and all passing things, — you need not find 
the fault with me or with the man, if the word of the meaning 
sometimes speaks through the ordinary talk. They who do not 
enjoy the company and the occasion may quite easily pass on; 
but they must miss, so, something of what most essentially 
belongs to the story they are superficially impatient for. 

One afternoon — the light flickering soft through the maples, 
and the still boughs framing little pictures of orchard and 
sloping grain-field, and mountain-side black with shadow, and 
blue horizon-tips misty and faint with the full, upper sun-pour 

— France leaned, a very picture herself of a delicious ease, 
unafraid of break or obtrusion, in Miss Ammah’s long sea-chair, 
that she brought here always for her “ mountain deck ” ; beside 
her, on a little white pine table, her bright wools, the work she 
was busy on, her last books, her patience-box, and a plate of 
superb, amber-ripe, early plums ; Miss Ammah herself close by 
in the comfortable rocking-chair “ with a slump to it ” from the 
east sitting-room, and her work, some quite plain, old-fashioned 
“ white-seam,” in her always busy but never hurrying hands. 

Mrs. Heybrook came out, bright from her fifteen-minute nap, 
her hair freshly smoothed and turned up in its thick gray twist, 
’ — she had no time for caps and she was thankful they were out 
of fashion, — and her clean lilac cambric “ polonay ” tucked up 
with just one pinch over her black alpaca skirt. The “ mixed 
Wool " knitting work in her hand showed that she had come to 

visit a little.” 


MOUNTAIN-FOGS, ETC. 


llo 


Miss Ammah knew better than to offer her the rocking-chair. 
To do that would be to scare her altogether from perching in any 
way. Left to herself, she came around to the red rocker, on the 
other side fi’om France’s table. Then Miss Ammah said, rather 
imprudently even yet, “That’s right. Mother Heybrook; sit 
down.” 

“ Sit standin’,” said Mother Heybrook. “ That ’s all I ever do, 
you know.” But she put out her hand and took a thick,'paper- 
bound book from the pine table. It was the “ Marquis of Los- 
sie.” “ My ! what a sight o’ readin’ !” she exclaimed, turning the 
double-columned leaves. “ It ’s a story, I s’pose. It ’s a won- 
der to me how so much that jest a story could ever be allowed 
to happen, in this drivin’ world ! ” Mother Heybrook used 
“allowed” in the sense of “supposed,” or “held probable.” 
“ An’ let alone happenin’, how any one man could ever stop his 
own work to write it all down. My ! ” 

“You see that is precisely his own work, Mrs. Heybrook,” 
said France, smiling. “And that is only the second part of one 
story,” she added, for the fun of the effect. 

But Mother Heybrook could take in the two as well as the 
one, while her mind was on the stretch. “ Well, there ’s differ- 
’nces of gifts and administrations, but the same sperrit,” she 
allowed, with a generous toleration of George Macdonald. “ It 
takes all sorts o’ folks and all sorts o’ workers to make up the 
world to the Lord’s mind. I s’pose 't is to his mind, but I don’t 
have time to see through but a small piece of it. There must, 
too, be a sort o’ people set apart a purpose to do the readin’, 
seems to me.” 

At this moment, a youth with two baskets, one in either 
hand, came across the grass slope toward the house from the 
roadway, and, seeing Mrs. Heybrook on the piazza, turned his 
steps to the end entrance of that, instead of keeping on around 
the house to the kitchen door. 

At sight of him France took up her patience cards. She had 
seen him before, when she had been with Sarell and the house- 
mother in the domestic precincts of the dwelling ; and she had 
made enough acquaintance with him to find that just a dash of 
coolness and acidity was a good accompaniment to conversation 
with him, as one takes lemon juice with raw oysters. 


116 


ODD, Oli EVEN ? 


He wore, and kept on, a big, flapping straw hat, which was 
the regulation chapeau of the hay-makers and field-workers 
hereabouts, — a wonderful construction, with high, round crown, 
independent of any fashion of all time, and a slope of brim that 
dipped and ended simply with reference to the horizon line of the 
e.irth, and not to the style or effect of the human countenance. 
From under this particular specimen of the picturesque “big 
pyramid ” — as France had christened the head-gear, because of 
its essential relations and earth proportions — looked forth a face 
impertinently handsome, imperturbably self-assured, defiantly 
“ as-good-as-you-are.” And this is just the sort of face that can 
hardly ever get the worse out of it again, — though the worse 
of it be not so very bad, — or the better of it, — that might be 
so very much better, — in. It belies itself, long after there are 
better things to be expressed in it. But the objectionableness 
of Flip Merriweather’s face was that as yet it told an “ ower 
true tale,” and no contradiction. “He was real bright,” 
Mother Heybrook said of him, “but as consated as a young 
rooster that had just got the swing of his tail-feathers.” He 
had russet-brown hair, — more red in it than there was in Rael 
Heybrook’s, — eyebrows and a soft moustache-line of a deeper 
color, and under the shade of the former, which were low and 
level, a pair of changeable blue eyes that twinkled like water in 
the sun, or darkened, when a cloud came over, till they grew 
shadow-black. He was the young brother-in-law of Doctor 
Fargood, who had married Grace Merriweather, a farm-bred 
girl, daughter of plain old Moses Merriweather, of Wakeslow, 
in the back hills. Flip had come here a few years ago, on his 
father’s death, with a very little money, his share from the sale ' 
of the farm, his fresh verdancy, his quick adaptabilities, and 
his prospects, which were those of every American-born citizen, 
and ranged from the plough-tail to the presidency. He had 
since then alternated between winter schools and summer farm 
work for the doctor. 

He had been one year at the academy at Askover, and that 
having been the close of his opportunities, as far as he could 
reckon upon them, in that line, he reckoned himself, in a cer- 
tain way, as finished ; capable, at any rate, of going on in 


MOUNTAIN-FOGS, ETC. IIT 

any specific direction, and of his own impetus, if he took a 
mind. 

He liked books, if he might pick and choose, and he read the 
newspapers, and remembered, to retail glibly, what men further 
out in the world were saying of things. He had no idea that there 
was very much going on anywhere that had not come round to 
him. Moreover, he did not thank it so very much for coming 
round. He felt as if it were he that had picked it up, merely, as 
the young rooster does the corn, not noting how or why it had 
come to be scattered for him. Really, he was rather in danger of 
getting finished, right where he was, which would have been as 
bad a thing, short of moral evil, as could have happened to him. 

He had interested France when she had first seen him, and 
he would have done so still could he have kept his place 
sufficiently to have been safely observed in it ; but in one or 
two little civil talks she had had enough, she thought, and had 
not cared to invite speech subsequently. The spirit of her 
order, which she abjured wherever she could honestly please 
herself in despising it, came up in her again against this sort of 
thing, for which it had its use, and she snubbed Flip deliciously. 

Flip — or Philip, as you see he would be properly called if 
he ever grew enough to outgrow the fit of the other — under- 
stood heP perfectly ; hated her a little, — while capable of being 
charmed with her, — with a saucy, not malignant, hatred ; wore 
his most indifferent airs in her presence ; never failed of an 
opportunity for being there, or of there demonstrating himself ; 
continually, as it were, firing off some little Fourth of July 
crackers by way of declaration of independence. 

She was the first person he had ever met — he fancied that 
coming within the same ten square feet with her, in Mother 
Heybrook’s kitchen stoop or front piazza, was meeting her — in 
whom he had encountered that subtile element of higher de- 
gree, which sets the lower to measuring itself by the very 
tiptoe stretch with which it holds an assumed level. There 
had been the minister, indeed ; there was Rael Heybrook ; there 
was the lady, Miss Ammah Tredgold. But Rael never assumed, 
never held himself, so to speak, at his real altitude. Flip felt, 
in regard to him, that he did n’t show for his chances : and 


118 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


there were gravity of office, and the years of half a lifetime, 
between him and the other two, to set them sepai’ate. Besides 
which, it is quite possible to walk along one’s daily path una- 
bashed by the overshadowing of the cedar-tree, or the growth 
of the lithe ash sapling, easily bending and making no pretence 
of girth, or the fixed stature of the little, gnarled, old-lady apple- 
tree, to be suddenly surprised by a rose-tree, whose gentle 
sprays are fresh and young at a foot grade, but whose topmost 
dancing leaves fling their dewdrops over one’s head or in one’s 
face, and whose proud-sweet blossoms may not be approached 
for the thorns that are set invisibly around them. 

Only a girl, with her white ruffles and delicate ways, her 
crochet work and her story-books, her low-trained speech, 
and the sweep of soft garments, whose hems seemed to signify 
a circle about her that held her in some withdrawing element 
separate from the common air ; and yet it was common air 
and common ground anywhere that she might choose to be, ex- 
cept for the very time that she was there. In that place and that 
moment, though it might be the chicken-yard, and the moment 
when his way lay through it with some man’s errand or busi- 
ness, and she had neither errand nor business at all, he felt 
himself, in spite of his fixed mind about himself, put aloof : a 
creature stood there with miles of impassable atmosphere be- 
tween her and him, somehoiu. It was this how that he set his 
indifference and his defiance against. He might as well have 
tried to jostle a rainbow. But he could not keep himself con- 
tent out of the spray of it. 

He had come now with some supplies to Mrs. Heybrook, as 
he did often. The baskets held fish and fruit ; a dozen splendid 
silvery, speckled trout in one, bedded in cool handfuls of fresh 
grass ; in the other, great blue mountain berries, rich with 
bloom, and heaped with that effect of abundance which shows 
with the heaping of round forms as with nothing else, so indi- 
vidual they are, so revealing of each other, touching ever but 
at one single point, but so unnumberable. 

Mrs. Heybrook got up as he came into the piazza. 

“ I told you so,” she said, “ I never get set down but some* 
thin’ comes along to rise me up again. Too, I 'm glad it ’s you, 


MOUNTAIN-FOGS, ETC. 119 

Flip, with your trouts and your berries. Those come from 
Thumble.” 

“ Yes, marm, from the tip-top. They don’t grow anywheres 
else.” 

He was sure of himself there, at any rate. The tip-top of 
Thumble, mastered for a peck of berries, was no small thing. 

“What does Thumble mean!” France asked in a gently re- 
stricted voice, looking up at Mrs. Heybrook as she passed her 
with the baskets. 

“ Why, Thumble means that long, scraggy mountain you see 
to the right, over the shoulder of the oak ridges. Did n’t you 
knowl” 

“ Oh, yes ; I ’ve heard them call it so, but I mean why ? 
Why Thumble 1” 

“Well, I don’ know as I can tell you positive. It may have 
got its name from the tunible of it ; it drops clear down a thou- 
sand feet into the river the other side ; an’ again at the Bend, 
this way, it ’s a straight pitch to Mill Hollow ; the only way 
over it is a slant betwixt the two. Or some folks say it ’s prop- 
erly ‘ Tim Bell,’ from a man named Tim Bell that got killed by 
a bear there. But if he did, ’t was a hundred years ago, an’ I 
don’t s’pose anybody knows. I’ll take two of these trouts 
down to ’Lando to-night. They ’ll be real relishin’, ” 

“Now Mrs. Heybrook!” expostulated Miss Ammah, “you 
said you would n’t go down there to-night. Why don’t you 
mid the fishl” 

“ La sakes, ’t ain’t nothin’ jest to slip down with ’em. Try- 
phosy, she ’s busy with Enimerly, an’ likely ’s not she 'd set ’em 
away till mornin’. I ’ll jest see he has ’em.” 

“That means, dear Mrs. Heybrook,” said France, in her 
peculiarly sweet tone when she felt special kindness, “ that you 
will cook them and carry them to him, and wait till he has 
eaten them, and then wash the plates ! Why don’t you ever 
remember that you are tiring yourself out 1 ” 

“ 0, put tire to tire an’ at it again ! that ’s the only way in 
this world, Miss France.” And the cheerful old Samaritan dis- 
appeared with the baskets. 

The Yankee fashion of utterance is much like the Scotch : 


120 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


they to whom it is native, however properly they can upon 
occasion give every vowel its due, and economize their nega- 
tives, and deny themselves their clipping apostrophes, invariably 
abandon themselves to the vernacular w'hen they are most 
hearty or most graphic in their talk. France Everidge’s musical 
speech, just as earnest and as easy in its flow, yet adulterating 
no sound nor abbreviating any syllable except the everyday 
“do not,” contrasted itself with Mother Hey brook’s enunciation, 
and limited Mr. Flip’s attention. He pared the rind of the 
gracious fruit, and took the paring instead of the sweet heart 
of it. More than that, he thought, or put on the air of think- 
ing, that the rind was meant to be flung in his face. Around over 
Mrs. Heybrook’s shoulder ! That was the absurdity and the 
vanity of the boy. 

“ Up in this part of the world, Miss France,” he said, care- 
fully pronouncing, “ where w'e have not quite the leisure to devote 
to the minutiae of our ways, we — ain’t ha’af se’ easy tuckered 
aout.” 

France spread out her cards, a column of aces in the middle, 
four cards each side, for the “ Egyptian.” “ I beg your pardon, 
Mr. Flip,” she said, catching herself up as one preoccupied, who 
perceives she has been spoken to and seizes on the escaping echo 
of the last few words. “ Took a doubt 1 Of what, please ] ” 

“ Not in the least degree of your perspicacity, not the least 
in the universe,” returned the youth, delighted wuth the 
skirmish, and getting up a notch higher yet on his conversational 
stilts, “only of your comprehension of how country people can 
hold out. I suppose, now, you could n’t climb Thumble, and 
you w'ould find it hard to believe that anybody could if they 
did n’t bring the berries down.” 

France left him to his supposition, holding her fingers 
thoughtfully on her “end cards,” while she, really, not pre- 
tentiously, threaded in her mind the possible moves to clear a 
line. 

Miss Tredgold came to the rescue of civility. Flip, in his 
turn, had taken up “ The Marquis.” In the midst of her cal- 
culation France sent an anxious glance from under her eyelids ; 
she did not like to have Macdonald fingered profanel 3 \ 


MOUNTAIN -FOGS, ETC. 


121 


“ Have you read ‘ Malcolm ’ 1 ” asked Miss Tredgold. 

“ No, ma ’am,” with a slighter emphasis on the address than he 
had given Mother Heybrook, “ ’t is n’t in my style. I have n’t got 
the gift of the tongues. It’s too much trouble to make ’em out.” 

“Which tongues 1” asked France, unable to resist. “There 
were tongues once, you know, which every man heard according 
as he was bom.” 

“ Was there 1 ” drawled Flip supremely. “ I s’pose I ’m not to 
the manner born at all, then.” 

“ Or have n’t got hungry enough in the wilderness, perhaps,” 
said France, going back to her cards. 

“ What a lot there is of it, alwiz,” said Flip precisely, as he 
thought, and turning the leaves without lifting the book. “ All 
that ’s a hard road to travel just to come at a few particular 
kinks the man has got in his head.” 

“ It ’s a long climb up Thumble,” remarked France demurely, 
accenting delicately the “ climb.” 

“ I say ! ” cried Flip, falling into more elegant English than 
he knew, “ don’t haul me over Thumble again ! ” 

“ Those great sweet berries don’t grow anywhere else,” said 
France. 

Flip laughed, and flashed his eyes at her again from under 
his hat-brim. 

“ I say ! ” he repeated, just as if he had been reading inter- 
national stories, and perhaps he had, “you can hit fine. You ’d 
do to preach, yourself. But what do you suppose our minister 
would think to see you playin’ cards 1 ” 

“ He would think it just what it is, — a game of patience.” 

“ If he should just come up now, he ’d — ” 

“ He ’d take his hat off first of all, Mr. Merriweather,” inter- 
rupted the minister lightly, and suiting the action to the word, 
as he came up by France’s side from behind her. Flip Merri- 
weather, of course, facing the piazza-end, had been watching 
him across the grass sward. 

Flip laughed again ; but somehow the next instant the “big 
pyramid” was lying on the settee beside Mr. Kingsworth’s panama. 

Mr. Kingsworth had drawn up a chair, France made a 
motion to sweep her cards together. 


122 


ODD, OR EVEN? 

“ Don’t do that,” said Bernard. “ I would like to be shown 
‘ patience ’ presently.” 

“ It is Egyptian patience,” she said, “ which I believe is 
rather obstinate.” 

“The patience of Pharaoh 1 I should infer so,” said Mr. 
Kingsworth, smiling. 

“ Mr. Merriweather,” said France, reinforced in some mental 
strength, if not her patience, “ will you be so kind as to hand 
me the book if you have done with it 1 lam reverent of Mac- 
donald,” addressing herself to the minister, and smoothing the 
paper covers of the volume. “ I buy him in paper and then I 
have him bound more honorably, as you do not find him bound 
yet in the book-shops.” 

“ Did you ever see the man. Miss France ? ” asked Bernard. 

“Yes. I don’t know, that is, whether it was the man or 
the angel of him, Mr. Kingsworth. It was what always — ” 
France stopped. She could not quote Scripture unreservedly, 
though it often came close to her speech, of certain things. 

“ Beholds the face of the Father,” Mr. Kingsworth finished. 
“ I can believe that.” 

“ I saw him in the pulpit, when he stood up in the place of 
the Prophet Isaiah, and read ‘ Comfort ye my people,’ as if it had 
just been given to him, and had never been heard before. And 
then he spoke — between the people at the foot of the mountain, 
and the glory on the top of it,” said the girl, blushing at her 
own enthusiasm, yet carried on by it, nevertheless. “After 
that, I did not care to see him in the parlors, being introduced 
to all the silly, curious people, — as well as to the real ones, — • 
and eating ice-creams.” 

“ I should n’t suppose he objected to the refreshment,” said 
Flip Merriweather. 

“Of the ice-creams 1 I should think not,” returned France, 
with a perfectly grave face. And there was a slight pause. 

“ What do you think of George Eliot 1 ” Flip asked suddenly, 
with the air of coming down upon something weaker with a 
tremendous bomb-shell of greatness. 

“ I think she is Thumble without the berries,” France answered 
quietly. 


MOUNTAIN-FOGS, ETC. 123 

The minister looked at her and smiled, — a quick, pleased 
smile, — but added nothing, except that, to her remark. 

“You were asking about the Osmundas the other day,” he 
said presently. “ 1 have brought one or two numbers of ‘ Eaton ’ 
to show you.” And taking up a flat parcel that lay under the 
panama, he untied the cover and opened the leaves to the 
“ Osmunda Regalis.” 

There it stood, in color, on the page, — a great sheaf, rearing 
its fronds, crownlike, and just bending them outward in stately 
circle ; a grandly gracious thing, speaking its word of the world 
in plainest gesture. France looked at it, aware of the word in 
such wise as to keep silent. 

Flip Merri weather looked too ; he moved slightly nearer, along 
the red settee, to do so ; Mr. Kingsworth, holding the book, met 
his movement as slightly, not withdrawing it from France. 

After a moment, Mr. Kingsworth turned the page. 

“ I was interested in this,” he said, “ about the name ‘ Os- 
munder, the Saxon name for Thor.’ Thor the Strong, who 
slays the giants with his hammer, you know. And yet, the 
Saxon ‘ Osmund,’ means, some say. Peace, and some say, 
The Protection of God ; also, ‘ Osmund the Waterman ’ was 
the name of the plant in plden time ; the white part of the root 
being good for bruised and beaten hurts, hurts caused by fall- 
ing from high places. This white pith was called ‘ The Heart of 
Osmund the Waterman.’ And again, ‘Another old name was 
St. Christopher’s (the Christbearer’s ) Herb.’ The thunder 
and the slaying, yet also the peace ; the hurling down from 
high places, then the healing of the bruised and beaten. 
The ‘ Heart of Osmund ’ means something like the heart of 
the Great Helper. The Christbearer’s herb grows, high and 
beautiful and self-revelant, in the weeping, waste places, 
under the dangerous crags. There is a ‘ correspondence ’ in 
that. Miss France.” 

France turned back to the beautiful drawing, saying nothing. 

Flip Merriweather slipped back to his further place on the 
red settee. “ You could make things like that out anywhere, — ■ 
of anything, — could n’t you 1 ” he asked of Mr. Kingsworth. 

Mr. Kingsworth simply answered, “Yes.” 


124 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


Flip was baffled by the assent, which agreed to something in 
his words he had not meant in them. 

France sat still, still looking at the Osmunda, growing so 
low in the w^aste places, yet so high and fair and precious ; 
waiting, “ self-revelant ” indeed, below the hard heights of the 
world, whence one might fall to be broken. Waiting there, 
with gift of peace. What did it all mean to her 1 It seemed 
to say something, — further on, as if she had not come quite to 
the clear hearing of it, — into a waiting, listening place of her 
life that would receive it. As if she would be ready for it 
some time, and that then it would be there. 

“ I said ‘ make ’ things, Mr. Kingsworth,” resumed Flip. 

“ 1 thought you said ‘ make out.’ But, either way, what do 
you make of the making 1 ” 

“ It is n’t finding, is it 1 The thing may n’t be there till you 
make it.” 

“ I think we are all finders, Philip.” Mr. Kingsworth always 
gave him his name, imputing the growing and the outgrowing. 
“ There is only one Maker.” 

“They are fixed so that you can find them anyhow, though, 
according to your own make : it ’s the shape of your head.” 

“ Precisely. And there is the same maker — or mender — 
of that.” 

“ If we were all turned out of one mould, there would n’t be 
much account in it, I should say. There might as well be 
only one of us.” 

“ Instead of that, there is only one truth, and all of us, and 
all our different ways and measures of seeing it.” 

“ Supposing you don’t see it at all 1 ” 

“ There is still the outside, the parable of it, waiting, as it 
was put there to do.” 

“ Does n’t that beg the question 1 How do you know ? ” 

“ ‘ I will open my mouth in parables. I will utter things 
kept secret from the foundation of the world.’ You understand 
the ablative case, Philip 1 ” 

“ ‘ With, from, in, or by ’ ? that much,” Flip answered, laugh- 
ing. He was pleased with his little bit of academy Latin com- 
ing in, being appealed to. 


MOUNTALN-FOGS, ETC. 


125 


“ Then suppose we read ‘ in,’ or ‘ by,’ instead of ‘ from,’ ‘ the 
foundation of the world ’ 1 Is n’t there something in that which 
explains the putting there 1 ” 

“ If you take it so'. It ’s the shape of your head, after all.” 

“ ‘ Therefore speak I to them in parables : because they see- 
ing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they un- 
derstand. . . . Lest at any time they should see with their 
eyes, and hear with their ears, and should understand with 
their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them,’ ” 
quoted Mr. Kingsworth again. “ That is the heart of the healer, 
waiting for them that shall fall down from their ‘mountain.’” 

But Flip was still only climbing his mountain. He was 
pleased at every clutch and foothold he got, that seemed to lift 
him higher. 

“And yet the fog is put there on purpose ! it says so,” — the 
boy did not dare say “ He,” — “ ‘ lest ’ they should see, and un- 
derstand, — and the rest of it ! That ’s just the way. Why 
could n’t it be plain, if it meant to be 1 ” 

“ Suppose you fasten the door, at night, ‘lest ’ any unauthor- 
ized person should come in?” 

“Well, I do exactly that,” said Flip, wondering what it 
justified in respect of a door that he was contending should be 
freely open. 

“And suppose you leave it unlocked ‘lest’ your brother 
should come home at midnight 1 ” 

Whether he was puzzled, or whether he began' to see, Flip 
made no answer. 

“Don’t you see there are two ‘lests,’ — a providing against, 
and a providing for 1 ” asked the minister. “ Take those words 
with the second ‘ lest.’ ‘ I speak to them these things in para- 
bles ; I put them away, in their memory, as in my creation ; 
so that they may see, even without perceiving, and hear, even 
if they cannot understand ; in case that at any time, they 
should see with their spiritual eyes, and hear with their spirit- 
ual ears, and understand with the very heart of them, and be 
converted, and I should heal them.’ Isn’t the waiting there, in 
those words 1 ” 

“You have altered a good many of them.” 


126 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 

“ I have chosen between those two ‘ lests,’ ” said Mr. Kings- 
worth. “ That interpreted all the sentence, which I tried to 
translate, not change. Because, otherwise, how do they agree 
with those different words, — ‘I am come unto you that ye 
might have life ’ ; and ‘ I came to call the sinners ’ t ” 

Flip was not quite so instant with his word of objection this 
time. There was something in those sentences that claimed, at 
least, the separateness of a moment between them and any 
smaller speaking. But he was only decently waiting, — though 
the waiting might have argued something with him if he had 
questioned it, — and the rejoinder was on his lips. 

“That is proving things by the Bible,” he said. “Have n’t 
you got first to prove the Bible 1 ” 

“ Have you got first to prove Euclid before you can take the 
facts of Euclid 1 ” 

“ Euclid proves himself, all along. There is n’t anything to 
argue about but the facts, and they settle themselves.” 

“So I think.” 

“ I suppose you mean you think so about the Bible. But 
people do stuff the whole thing at you, — hide, hoofs, and 
horns. Do you believe every word in it, — as you do in Euclid, 
— Mr. Kingsworth 1 ” Flip asked this question deliberately, 
his eyes not flashing, but fixed, full and wide open, upon Mr. 
Kingsworth’s, as if he meant to know ; as if he put the man on 
common sense and honor, to answer him. 

“ Do you mean believe or understand, Philip 1 Perhaps I do not 
yet understand, to receive, all geometry, but I know enough to 
believe that the rest is there.” 

“ I mean, don’t you run against anything in it that you can't 
believe 1 What do you do about Jonah and the whale 1” 

“ At which end of a proposition do you begin 1 At that 
which you have already come to see, so as to start from, or at 
the Q. E. D.l” asked Mr. Kingsworth, smiling. “ I don’t think 
I need take the story of Jonah at the whale end ! There is 
something in it which I know already. In myself, in other 
men, and elsewhere in the Bible, — which I may as well say at 
first I take as an inside story oi things, — I find that which shows 
how it concerns me and the world, a reason why it was put 


127 


MOUNTAIN-FOGS, ETC. 

there in Jonah’s life, and in the poem of it. I see men every- 
day, I find myself, starting off on wrong tracks, turning away 
from God’s errand, and getting storm-beaten and afraid. I find 
that consciousness waking up, full of dread, which says, ‘ I, 
myself, am the fault of it ; through my self-will it has gone 
wrong for me and for others : cast me into the sea, let me go I 
I have cast myself there already, I have foundered myself, but 
the ship must be saved.’ And then, for a time, I know a great 
darkness, mercifully prepared of the Lord, may seize upon the 
man who comes to the saying of that ; and for three days and 
three nights — a time that seems complete of his whole life, 
and to be the end and upshot of it, and rounded into a concep- 
tion of eternity — I, or that man, may be so swallowed of a 
mighty, terrible creature of truth, which is an experience and a 
fact of it, may be so in its power and devoured of it, as ‘ out 
of the belly of it,’ ‘ out of the belly of hell,’ to cry at last unto 
the Lord of me and of the creature, and say, ‘ I am cast out 
of thy sight ; yet will I look toward thy Holy Temple ! ’ And 
when the man has been brought to that, it is a little thing for 
the Lord to lead that great circumstance of his, which he had 
prepared and commanded, and to ‘ speak unto it ’ that it shall 
cast forth his Jonah, the soul of his child, upon the fair, dry 
land; and then ‘the word of the Lord’ comes unto Jonah the 
second time, ‘ unto salvation.’ ” 

The boy, whose cavils were secondhand, borrowed of what he 
fancied the last word of human progress and the overgrowing 
of baby myths, and who really had never so much as read for 
himself the mighty soul-epic of the prophet, but who only knew 
by hearsay, and perhaps by a curious skimming of the external 
of the text so far as related to the hearsay merely, — that a man 
had once been said to have been swallowed by a fish, and vom- 
ited up again, — stopped where he was left by Bernard Kings- 
worth ; and that was in the Joppa from which he had not started 
yet, even for Tarshish, to flee from any word of the Lord that 
had so much as come to him. 

Mother Heybrook had brought out the empty baskets, and 
hearing that which was being spoken, had sat down again, and 
heard it through. 


128 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 

“ There ’s odd things in the Bible, certin,” she said in her 
sweet old-lady’s voice. “ And so there is in things an’ in 
people; but when I come across ’em, I jest say to myself, 

‘ There ain’t ever an odd that ain’t half an even,’ and the other 
half is sure to fit on somewheres.” 

“ Do you remember,” said Mr. Kingsworth, — he did not ask 
directly of anybody ; but his sense was now of France Ever- 
idge’s face, full of some inward movement of light, as it had 
left the fern-drawing, and rested itself upon the far, gray 
mountain, — “ do you remember ‘ the sign of the prophet 
Jonah’ that was all there was to be for the generation of the 
world that looked only for. outside proving 1 I doubt if that 
generation, as the Lord counts generations, has yet passed 
away. I doubt if the Sou of man, as regards that genera- 
tion, be not yet ‘ buried in the heart of the earth,’ and if the 
world may not have to cry out like Jonah before the soul of it 
can be set free. I think, also, that He knew the truth about 
that story, when He quoted it to the people against their 
unbelief.” 

“ It ’s the other half, ain’t it 1 ” asked simple Mrs. Heybrook. 
And Bernard Kingsworth’s smile shone over his face again, as he^ 
turned it toward her for reply. 

Flip Merriweather picked up his two baskets and his straw 
hat. 

“ I did not altogether answer your question, Philip,” Mr. 
Kingsworth said, rising with him. “ I do believe the Christian 
Bible, — for the Old Testament was the Scripture which the 
Lord said ‘testified’ of him while he was living the New, — is 
the book of divine truth, told in the divine language of truth, 
which is that in the very signs of things and of events; as 
much as I believe and see that the books of Euclid are the 
texts of essential mathematical knowledge, told in the lan- 
guage, which proves itself, of lines and angles. I hardly care 
to reason about it historically and externally, any more than I 
care to know all about the ‘father of mathematics,’ and who 
fathered him, before I accept his axioms and solutions. And 
until a man has searched the Christian Scriptures for whst they 
integrally are, I hardly think him qualified to argue sr how 
they came about.” 


MOUNTAIN-FOGS, ETC. 


129 


It was all said in a very quiet, conversational tone, even with 
a deference in it of answering a question that inferred the ques- 
tioner “ a man ” and in earnest ; and Flip Merriweather, though 
his blue eyes still twinkled unabashed, and his smooth, round 
chin held itself unrelaxed with any conscious “ taking down,” 
was perhaps a shade nearer in that moment to becoming a man 
and in earnest, and so learning how to be taken down that he 
might be helped up again, than he had ever come before. 

“ That has n’t gone more than skin-deep after all,” said Miss 
Ammah, as the boy went off. “ The question is more with him 
about swallowing whales than getting swallowed by them or by 
anything else, and will be for a while. It seems to me that 
people up here are divided into those who won’t swallow and 
those who think they have swallowed all that is required. I 
should think it would be hopeless work preaching in Fellaiden.” 

“ To preach anywhere. Miss Ammah, one needs to keep in 
mind that preaching and praying are really the same word. 
If one had to find it in one’s self, or make place for it in others, 
it would be hopeless, — hopeless and thankless.” 

“ There is the same thing everywhere,” said France. “ All 
the school-boys and the very little children in the Sunday- 
schools are trying their small hands at tipping over the theol- 
ogies. I had a little girl ask me, what made God tell the 
children of Israel not to kill when he had just killed all the 
Egyptians'? And then a boy spoke up and said, ‘ Yes, and he 
was marching them right straight along to kill all the Ites in 
Canaan.’ ” 

“What did you tell them. Miss France?” 

“ I said I did n’t know ; and I went to the superintendent 
that day after school, and gave up my class.” 

“ Did he ask your reason ? ” 

“Yes, and I told him I didn’t understand the ten com- 
mandments.” 

“ Not understand them to keep them ? Could you say 
that ? ” 

“ I could n’t teach them.” 

“ Don’t you mean you could n’t teacli God’s keeping of them ? 
Did n’t you let the whale swadow you, then. Miss France?” 

9 


130 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


“ Perhaps I did, but it was a whale.” 

“ Which proves the essence of the story of Jonah.” 

“What would you have told those children, Mr. Kings* 
worth 1 The worst was, I was sure that behind the children 
were the grown people. They did n’t think of all that for them- 
selves, any more than Mr. Flip stumbled originally over Jonah. 
What would you have told them 1 ” 

“ I don’t know, but maybe something like this : those com- 
mandments are very great. God knows the whole of them. We 
only know them as we do them. Perhaps until God gets a world 
of men ready to work for Him, who have learned them by doing 
them through and through to the very highest they can make 
of them. He will manage the world as it chooses to be man- 
aged, by binding and hindering and punishing and killing, just 
as He lets fire burn and water drown and all men die once, 
that He may save their lives forever and ever. God knows. 
That is all I know : and we are to do as He has said, if we want 
to know Him and His ways and have Him govern us as He 
governs the angels. And then I might have remembered that 
we, in our day, have the New Testament alongside the Old, and 
that that is just why we can pick flaws in the stories of the Old. 
The very flaws God let be there that men might come to see 
them. I might have told them what the Lord has said about 
keeping His commandments, and that to kill was to be even so 
much as angry with one’s brother without a cause.” 

“ You were not there, Mr. Kingsworth,” said France gravely. 
“ And the time is full of such flaw-picking, and the right man 
is hardly anywhere to show the right side of things.” 

“And yet ‘the Son of man is in the heart of the earth’; 
not dead and buried there, but the living centre and reason of 
things. That is why the earth trembles and quakes ; and in 
the very clouds that hide and hinder He will come by and by. 
He is coming with his glory.” 

“ I wish you could talk to people I hear talk,” said France, 
“ even people in pulpits.” 

For France, in her young heart, longing for the truth to be 
true, as every fresh heart does, had been troubled in her world ; 
in the social tone, in the things written and read and discussed ; 


MOUNTAIN-FOGS, ETC. 


131 


in her own home, with the practical motive of life, and with the 
expressed philosophy of it when, after a Sunday sermon, per- 
haps, or the report of some noted lecture, or of some new idea 
or theory advanced in an advance paper, right and revelation 
and providence, — yes, and virtually the very fact of a God, 
with a God’s heart that is human-infinite, and a God’s thought 
and knowledge that are thinking thought and working knowl- 
edge, like, only including, the actual thoughts and knowledges 
of men, — came to be mooted and vexed and muddled with 
half-arguments, and confused with irrelevancy, and put by into 
a hopeless limbo, to be drawn forth again another time, only 
for a like handling and a like vague dismissal, perhaps in con- 
sequence, largely, of the pulpit handling which she spoke of ; 
which was getting to be as vague, as ambiguous, as half-hearted, 
as apologetic, in reference to the very soul and centre and life 
of these things, — the Lord Christ himself, — as men were with 
the points that perplexed them, and made them doubtful when 
they tried to look, without Christ, at problems of right and 
providence, and what was to come of human life. “ Duty, God, 
immortality,” — the very slogan of the pulpit, — these were 
getting to be as dead words as the motto of the French Re- 
public, because the ideas of them were becoming separated from 
the thought and recognition of the living Lord, — the only 
way and truth and life ; — dead branches broken from him, and 
crumbling in men’s hands who would make staves of them. 

For the first time in her life France Everidge was beginning 
to get a live answer to things ; to one thing at a time, without 
a forcing of all else in heavens and earths, — except the author- 
ity of Him who came down that He might join the heavens and 
the earths, — into the research. 

“They won’t let you alone without all the old heathen,” 
said Miss Ammah. “ You need n’t say anything, — and you ’re 
a fool if you think, — unless you know all about Confucius and 
Zoroaster and Buddha, and can read Sanscrit, and have been 
brought up on the Zend-Avesta as well as on King James’s 
English Bible ; and unless you are up to the last discovery of 
how Moses got his notions of creation, and of how the greater 
pwrt of Genesis was picked up first in Assyria.” 


132 


ODD, OK EVEN ? 


“ Does it make any difFer’nce 1 ” said Mrs. Heybrook, chang' 
ing her needle, and stretching down the leg of the sock she was 
knitting. “ Don’t I get my clear water, runniu’ right into my 
dairy the whole blessed time, through the spouts from the hilH. 
and has n’t the spring been there in the hill ever sence the hill 
was there 1 an’ what if there alwers was other hills and springs 
and spouts, — in Khan-Tartary, perhaps 1 Don’t the water all 
come from the sea, an’ has n’t the sea and the sun and the 
clouds got the whole working of it 1 Shall 1 go and break up my 
spouts, an’ go athout my water, ’cause I don’ know, exactly, 
about spouts and dairies in Cochin-Chiuy 1 That ’s the way 
some folks talks, clear up here in Fellaiden, even.” 

“ I ’ll tell you why, Mrs. Heybrook,” said Miss Ammah com- 
posedly. “ It ’s just because they want to get rid of making the 
butter.” 

“ Which brings us back to the way of understanding the com- 
mandments,” said Mr. Kingsworth. 

“ Jest go t’ work and 'tend t’ your butter an’ things, an’ then 
you ’ll see the good o’ the spouts. An’ there ’t is ; I ’ve got to 
see to that bermonge I made for Tryphosy ; it must go down 
with the trouts,” and good Mrs. Heybrook was up and off again. 

France had begun replacing her cards. The wind of* the 
mountain had swept them gently together, the one under the 
other. In her mind was this thought ; — 

The Great Pyramid workers worked under command, just by 
inch and cubit; and they came out in agreement with the 
sun and the stars ; and in the middle of it was that man-meas- 
ure, nothing else ; but the way to i^af was the history of 
heavens and earth. I wonder if it was made for chronology and 
sky-pointing ; or if it had to be true with them, being true with 
itself? I wonder if the pyramid was built less for a stone mira- 
cle of revelation than to show how everything that stands on 
the right foundation-line, and builds up by perfect inches, 
comes to what tells of all the miracles, and stands straight iip 
under the sun, so that all the sun-measures are in it? — “Mr. 
Kingsworth,” she put her question aloud, “ did n’t the pyramid 
just turn out so, do you suppose, because of that beginning, 
and keeping on, upon the right inch? and didn’t it get square 


MOUNTAIN-FOGS, ETC. 


133 


with astronomy and history exactly because it was first square 
with the daylight, without Melchisedek, or anybody, knowing 
how it was to be 1 ” 

Mr. Kingsworth showed no perception of disconnection in the 
quick propounding of this apparently fresh matter. 

“ I do not think Melchisedek — if he was the human archi- 
tect — did know it all,” he said. 

“Of course the Lord knew,” France answered, in her mind ’ 
again ; and with the word there revealed itself to her, instantly, 
something that had not come to her in force before. That think- 
ing Thought and working Knowledge ^ — that divinely-human 
might of intellect, moving as a man’s brain moves, but with 
the origination of all the truths that a man’s brain labors dimly 
after in the sciences ; determining them into laws and work- 
ing with them, tools of its substance, to make worlds. And 
the Heart, whose desire is father of every fact, pulsing as the 
heart of a man pulses, but with infinite and almighty wish 
toward the children for whom it waits in the midst of its unap- 
proachable knowledges, — the Lamb in the midst of the throne, 
— until by little, faint, slow degrees, touching the hem of the 
garment, they may come to know that it does wait for them ; 
that it is the end and intent of creation, showing itself ; the 
living love of a living Person, who is patient through such 
cycles as the pyramid measures, with souls that come, — blun- 
dering, wandering, presuming, denying, returning, — to that 
which He has put in the plainness of the only actual speech, 
into the blazing word of an universe. 

Not just or fully in such syllables did the thought come to 
her. It came as a flash upon her own words, “ Melchisedek, or 
anybody,” and the after-thought implied in Bernard Kings- 
worth’s answer, “ The Lord knew.” It was a glimpse of realiza- 
tion, such as truly she had never had before, of that Humanity 
which created human beings. 

Before anybody. He was the body of Himself, purposing all 
things and everybody, worlds full, that these should know 
themselves to be because He was, and the things and worlds to 
be because He meant them. It is only in a flash, from out the 
eternities, that we see light like that. It is not possible to 


134 ODD, OR EVEN ? 

write it down ; yet it comes, — to the simple and to the chih 
dren. 

And all this while France sat with those little patience cards 
spread out before her, and her eyes falling upon them ; her 
fingers, even, straightening them to lie parallel with each other. 

Bernard Kingsworth was looking at her 3 he saw that some- 
thing, without his saying, was saying itself to her. 

They all sat quiet for a little while ; Miss Ammah pinching 
her hems by her card rule, the minister turning over the 
fern illustrations, as if for something he had meant to show. 
At some little breath or movement of the girl’s, however, as 
of one come back again into things just around her from an 
errand that had called her quite away, he put the numbers of 
“ Eaton ” together in a closed pile. 

“ I will leave these with you,” he said. “ You may find some 
of your old friends among them, and some strangers that you 
will learn how to look for. Now, Miss France, won’t you teach 
me your patience game 1 ” 

I think it very likely there was some gentle self-seeking, as 
well as some wise sense of fitness, in his thus leaving the larger 
subjects where they had rested. I think it very likely that 
Bernard Kingsworth felt some desire toward a simple, every-day 
companionship. He did not by any means wish to be altogether 
in the pulpit, or to wear his gown, in France Everidge’s pres- 
ence, or to her idea. Perhaps, even, he was a little jealous of 
himself, when he remembered himself as one of the sons of 
Aaron. A priest may be a priest after the true kingly order, 
and yet be wistful of a little ordinary recognition on the plane 
of his mere fellow-creaturehood. 

When Mother Heybrook came out to bid them all to her 
supper table, upon which the door now stood open, letting 
the fragrant tea-odor and the smell of her “ fire-cakes ” creep 
forth with their own irresistible invitation, Bernard and France 
were laughing like any two young, blithe-minded persons, over 
the sudden and absurdly easy resolution of the game that had 
pinned them to some twenty minutes of the most labyrinthine 
calculation before they had dared to move a card. 


IN THE RING OR ON THE ROAD ? 


135 


CHAPTER XV. 

IN THE RING OR ON THE ROAD? 

When a subject is to be brought to people’s minds, it nearly 
always bears down upon them from two, or several directions. 
It is as if the divinity that approaches us with its purposes that 
are to shape our ends made certain sure bee-lines from far-off 
points, which should concentre in our consciousness, and, meet- 
ing, kindle there some force that should work in us toward the 
inevitable, that seems the free thought and the free chosen. 
The very books we read, the gossip of the day, chance 
encounters and reminders, trifling side experiences, all pour in 
their drops of influence to swell the current that is to bear us, 
even when we think we are bearing ourselves most uncontrob 
ledly to the result. 

The “ Marquis of Lossie ” bore down with its large “ other- 
worldliness” and its grand humanity-showing, upon the puzzles 
and prejudices that were in France’s mind, and working there, 
more than she knew, upon her own story that was to be. 

But they did not criticize or analyze — she and Miss Ammah 
— the “ Marquis of Lossie ” ; it stood too self-manifest in truth 
and power, too evident in simple presentation of that which is 
indisputable, to invite dispute or questioning comment. Per- 
haps it touched too quickly the livest, sweetest, most secret 
springs of that sentiment in France which responded to its 
more than charm — its claim on the true and earnest and 
heaven-searching in her — to permit her to bring it to any ex- 
ternal judgment ; even to praise it, or declare delight in it. 
France had read it through to Miss Ammah : she was fond of 
reading aloud, and Miss Ammah was fond of listening. 

Then she took up another book, one that had come from the 
library. It was a clever little romance enough, an English 
novel, also ; not so deep or inclusive as to anticipate query or 


136 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


make supplement superfluous; they paused and chatted over 
it, accordingly. This had for subject, too, the circumstances, 
hardly the heart, of a socially unequal marriage. 

At the same time — another bee-line in letters from home 
— was coming, in numbers, the development of a Boston story of 
similar drift, in actual life ; the drifting into an “ odd engage- 
ment ” of two persons whom one would think, from the Everidge 
look at it, Providence had been under some temporary aberra- 
tion in flinging in each other’s way. 

A girl in “ their set,” which meant the set that was theirs, 
if any, since they preferred even to wait at its sometimes un- 
certain doors rather than to dwell in the open, hospitable tents 
that pitched themselves just without, had gone quite down into 
the very elements of society, to attach herself to a man who was 
really nobody from nowhere, — a mere clerk and drummer for 
one of the hundreds of little business houses somewhere down 
town, whom her brother had fallen in with on a railway jour- 
ney when there had been a smash and a scare, a good many 
bad hurts, and two lives lost ; to which his own — the broth- 
er’s — might have added a third, but for some stout-hearted 
and stout-muscled help that the young drummer stopped to 
give him, w^hen stopping made a question of his own life at the 
same moment. 

The brother brought the drummer to the house, and the 
ladies condescended to him ; bent graciously, I mean, and not 
without a certain bravery and stoutness of their own that 
touched the mutual social life as his bravery had concenied 
the physical when he had come with it to their avail. One, 
the youngest, and the brother’s pet companion, did not bend. 
She looked upward from the first,, as one receiving grace. But 
this is a story within a story. I have to do with nothing but 
its moral, and the way its moral came to Fellaiden. 

“I think people are ‘idgets’ !” said France, with a quietness 
of tone that hardly justifies an exclamation point, but a force 
in the qiiietness that cannot be printed without it. “ Are men 
men, and women women, or are they posts that just keep the 
social stories up, and that can’t move a stair’s height either 
way without bringing all the building down 1” 


IN THE RING OR ON THE ROAD? 


137 


“ That is n’t quite all,” said Miss Ammah, who felt it in her 
conscience to present whatever existed for presentation to this 
young mind, upon the family side of the society question. “ It 
is as men and women that they are likely, in most cases, to be 
affected by such differences. You see, all life is n’t romantic 
incident. A man may be brave — ” 

“ Gloriously brave,” put in France. 

“ Gloriously brave : and yet, every day, and all day long, 
when his bravery is n’t demanded, the little things of breeding 
and habit may be ; and we are such creatures of breeding and 
habit, and the little things do so make up life ; and to have had 
the same tastes, ideas, associations is so much between people 
who must always live together — ” 

“ Miss Ammah,” the girl interrupted, and then paused while 
she counted fifteen stitches for her vermilion-tinted wool in her 
Turkish pattern, “ a lady would n’t be likely to marry a clown, 
of course ; but if she finds a nobleman, who simply hasn’t come 
to his worldly estate or had advantage of it, and it is the man 
and the noble that she cares to pass her life with, — I should 
think it is for the great things that the little things always 
grow out of, in a life or a generation or two, that she would 
care, rather than for the little breedings that have only come 
down with the teaspoons, and left what first made the name, 
perhaps, behind them. See ! if Evelyn Westcott had married 
that little smoke-puff of a Harry Wardell, that whiffled round 
her last winter, nobody would have been astonished ; nobody 
would have cried out at a mismatch. And just look at the wo- 
man and look at the manikin ! Is n’t there any inequality except 
between a West-end avenue and a South-end cross-street 1 Or 
between a Court-square office and a way-down-town sample- 
room 1 ” 

“ Veiy good for an argument as to the nobleman and the 
manikin; but, my dear France, first catch your nobleman, and 
grant that the manikin is n’t inevitable as an alternative, or in 
polite circles. And remember, in your early wisdom, that, 
until your creature is caught, you can’t thoroughly determine, 
always, between Lepus and Leo. You can’t wholly know what 
a man is until you ’ve married him.” 


138 


ODD, OB EVEN ? 


“ You can’t wholly know what yourself is till you ’ve lived 
your life out,” returned France. “You can’t see your whole 
day’s road in the morning ; but you know which way you want 
to go, and people who mean to travel together must at least be 
starting the same way. And the question is whether they are, 
either or both of them, starting at all. A riding-school ring 
doesn’t lead anywhere.” 

It was tolerably plain that this young woman would take her 
head, when she had once determined in what direction to be 
headlong. 

Miss Tredgold left the main track of argument, and shunted 
off upon an old turnout. 

“ I don’t know anything about Miss Westcott’s affair,” she 
said ; “ she may have caught her nobleman. But the girl here 
in the book, however the author represents it, — and authors do 
mostly tell two different things in pretending to tell one ; the 
actual story, which speaks for itself in spite of them, and their 
interpretation of it, which they have to be as ingenious about 
as people are with their own consciences ; — this girl in the 
story just falls in love from mere propinquity. Somebody else 
in the same place would have been the same, as they would in 
half the real matches. That ’s what a woman has to look out 
— I mean in — for, in questioning her own mind.” 

Miss Ammah thought she had touched the subject with a 
very skilful wisdom now. It was well to have suggested that 
w’ord and that self-analysis to a girl like France, who, even in 
really finding a nobleman, must not too hastily find him to be 
her nobleman. 

But France took her up with that curiously veiled force 
again. 

“ Propinquity 1 Dear Miss Ammah, don’t you say that. I 
detest the word. It ’s as if one could n’t come within gunshot. 
It ’s like that miserable coon, — ‘ Don’t fire ; I ’ll come down.’ 
Women are not like that, unless it is with each other. You can 
be thrown with a girl you don’t care a pin for, and be cosy, just 
because she is another girl ; but a man, — you ’ve either got to 
like him like a man, or hate him like a scorpion, or turn out 
for him as you turn out for a toad.” 


IN THE KING OK ON THE ROAD? 


139 


She said it all without a single exclamation point in any tone. 
Of course she spoke from no personal feeling, so why should 
she exclaim 1 

^leanwhile, across two valley hollows, and the low flanks of 
two spurs of the great intervening hill, on a strip of roadway 
three quarters of a mile off by a crow’s flight, and a mile or 
more by the road-winding, she had caught a keen glimpse of a 
moving speck about as big as a crawling fly. She knew the 
crawl of it, which was not a fly-crawl, however modified in effect 
by distance and foreshortening of line of motion ; and she knew 
that Rael Heybrook was coming homeward from the Gilley 
wood-lot. 

“ Don’t you think. Miss Ammah, it would be nice up in the 
hay-mow this afternoon 1 I ’ve a mind to try it. Come, and I ’ll 
finish the book to you.” 

“ Come ? You ? How will you get there 1 ” 

“I feel a capability in my bones,” France answered. “I 
knew it would be there again some day. I can do it with a 
stick.” 

“But the stairs'! Not a scrap of a rail, and so steep and 
twisting! You might be helped up, but I couldn’t do it. 
You ’ll have to wait, I guess, till somebody ’s at home.” 

“ I don’t want any rail. I hate help,” she said quickly, with 
a venom in her last words thrown in as she indignantly per- 
ceived the quibble in her first, “ and I ’ve a kind of hankering 
for something steep and twisty. I can kneel up, or I can sit 
up ; but I must take time for it, so come, please. I know you ’d 
like it ; and the big windows are open, and the west w'ind is 
blowing through.” 


140 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


CHAPTER XVI. 

THE HAY-PARLOR. 

The men had left the little north-corner loft just comfortably 
piled with the new, fragrant hay-crop. All the rest of the barn 
buildings — a chain of three — were stack full. Miss Ammah 
always bargained for a “ hay-parlor.” 

Across the wide window-space above the doors were strong 
wooden bars, against which, half-way up, the middle mow 
pressed its affluent bulk, and the wind swayed pleasantly the 
stray, escaping locks. Over the bars the opening of the heavy 
shutter left a breezy space, and the wide cracks in the side- 
boardings of the old barn let the air sift through in a sweet, 
wandering way, even down in the low north corner ; and the 
sunlight lay here and there in slender golden lines across, 
making the tangled stalks show an intricate, illumined mesh- 
work. 

Quite up in the shade, against a luxuriously heaped slope, 
they sat and leaned, — Miss Ammah and France Everidge. 
Miss Ammah had brought book and baskets. They had two 
hours yet before the early tea-bell ; Mrs. Heybrook was resting 
in her bedroom ; all across and through the roadway, doorway, 
open house, and farmyard dropped delicious silence ; it was the 
luxury of absolute uninterruptiou, and the absence of all claim 
upon them. At first it was too delightful for anything but 
itself. Book and work waited. 

• “ There is n’t in all Commonwealth Avenue such a room, such 
perfection of upholstery, such gilding, such conservatory sweet- 
ness, as here !” said France. “Dear Miss Ammah, every city 
covers up a piece of the country, and every ‘ artistic ’ living — 
nobody says ‘artificial’ now — covers up what might be got 
straight at, like this ! ’’ 


THE HAY-PARLOK. 


141 


“ The people among it seem hardly to get it, though, as wo 
do, who come on purpose for it. They don’t have time. It is 
too hard work to live, — to make the hay and the butter, to 
plant the farm and feed the creatures, and provide for the ‘men- 
folks.’ ” 

“ Might n’t they have time 1 With all the machines^ and the 
bigger way of doing and dealing, there miglri be a way of farn^ 
living that should keep the deliciousness for family use. I sup- 
pose their fashions are handed down from the old times of the 
incessant spinning and weaving and hand-sewing in the house, 
and the hand-hoeing and mowing in the fields. They do have 
their ways of being fine, too, without being blessed. They sit 
in their ‘ best rooms ’ when they have company ; when out-doors 
the hay-mows are the real best rooms. I believe I — ” But 
what France believed of herself she did not go on to say. She 
did not go on to say anything for some minutes. A kind of 
dream surged or floated pleasantly through her mind. Of how 
people, knowing something of how to choose and use things, 
might make life on a farm like this as big and as beautiful as 
“ all out-doors,” having all out-doors for its summer doing and 
delight, and the long time-wealth of winter for its in-drawing, 
its thought-growth, its refining ; so that summer and winter, 
with their beauty and fulness, should play into each other with 
something more than mere seed-time and harvest, physical labor 
and rest. She wondered if the young generation — if the young 
men of this day, with this day’s chance for getting and knowing 
— would do like their fathers ; if Israel Hey brook, for instance, 
supposing he had to be a farmer all his life, would n’t — And 
then, suddenly, the thought took vision-shape of some home that 
must be here if he lived on, — some companionship, some woman- 
rule, after Mother Heybrook’s day was done. And what — 
whom — could Israel Heybrook find, or bring here, for that 1 
I have to finish out a sentence which was no sentence with her; 
was only a perception, which, when it began to define itself 
from the vague mist of her dream, made her start, and feel her 
very thought turn hot suddenly in her heart. What business 
was it of hers, and why should she find herself planning life for 
this farmer Rael ? 


142 ODD, OR EVEN? 

This farmer Rael at this moment drove his wagon into the 
barnyard. 

Now, of course, there was neither offence, nor suspicion of 
offence, between these two, the young man and the young 
woman. They had not come into intimacy near enough for 
that. They were intimate only with each other’s phantasm. 

In thought-image they had, consciously or unconsciously, come 
to that point that they were seldom absent the one from the 
other ; in actual presence, all that differed in their daily place 
and occupation, all that was utterly unlike in circumstance, the 
very relation that set them briefly under the same roof, held them 
naturally and easily apart, if they would have it so, or if they 
would not positively make it otherwise. Miss Everidge’s 'seclu- 
sion, and Rael HeylDrook’s work at the other side of Fellaiden 
Hill, had, without strangeness, made this nearly three weeks’ 
suspension of anything that could be named as intercourse. 
There had been chance for kind inquiry, and kind thanks in 
answer. France had turned pointedly aside from nothing ; she 
had only not moved toward it, and Rael could not possibly 
know how much or how differently she might have moved. 

There was a curious delicacy in him, also, which, perhaps, 
or perhaps not, France missed taking into perceptive account. 
He would not linger by her now, in her enforced stationari- 
ness, when he found her surrounded by her books and work 
in her piazza chair, as he might have done had she been still 
able to choose freely, and stay or go for herself. He would 
bring her some little wildwood or hillside token, — a bunch of 
ferns, or a branch of berries, or a handful of strange, lovely 
marsh or mountain blossoms, — would ask, in a courteousness 
that never reminded of courtesy, of her gain and welfare, and 
then, after some mere scrap of conversation, would pass on. 
He was a busy man, and France Everidge was an idle woman, 
so the idle woman thought ; and what should there be to hold 
him there, or make any long companionship between them ? 

Perhaps for the very reason of this slight and fragmentary 
intercourse, so restrained on both sides, and that could hardly 
be called intercourse, the three weeks since they had been so 
really and wonderfully together over the hill roads and in the * 


THE HAY-PARLOK. 


143 


sweet woods and the ravine of jewels, seemed now between 
them little more than the blank of a night, across which the last 
thing that happened was that most vivid to each separately, 
and that to which the next would join itself, however it might 
be ignored, when, or if ever, such association between them 
should begin again. 

Propinquity! There is nothing in simple adjacence half so 
perilous as a certain distance, an ellipse of orbit, that brings 
two together in mere comet flashes of approach, and leaves 
them, with a trail of light across their heavens, in separate 
wonder about each other’s nature, and by what calculation they 
may ever cross each other’s strange and lovely way again. 

The day upon that Mountain of the Precious Stones ; the 
dusk in which they encountered a peril and helped each other 
out of it ; the moments in which the strong man held the girl, 
disabled by a little hurt, as if he would hold her, strong and 
kindly, from any, every hurt that could be, — those were the 
last hours and moments in which they had really met. 

Rael unharnessed his horse ; they heard him below in the 
shed there ; they heard the wagon thills drop ; they heard him 
whistle as he hung up the tackle that was kept handy there ; 
and then they heard the old colt, with scrambling tramp, whose 
exaggeration sounded like the moving of some mastodon in the 
small space and on the echoing floor, coming up the deep step 
into the barn itself, and around into his stall. Rael came after, 
still whistling, with the halter. Then he pulled down hay for 
him that teemed itself into the hay-rack from the crowded loft 
above, and then they heard him cross the open floor, and come 
to the granary stairs. 

Miss Tredgold, when not off on a set expedition, was almost 
always in one of three places, — in her white-covered rocking- 
chair by the south-front window of her room, on the west 
piazza, or up here in the hay-mow. Where Miss Everidge 
might be, in these days of her keeping greatly to herself, as in 
the days when she was as apt to be down by the brook, or over in 
the cedar wood upon the hill, or in the pine-hollow, any five 
minutes as not, did not necessarily enter into the calculation. 
Rael Heybrook wanted to speak with Miss Tredgold. 


144 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


“ Are you there, Miss Ammah 1 ” he asked, as his tawny- 
brown hair and clear, handsome forehead and eyes came up 
into a streak of sun-light over a billow of hay. And Miss 
Ammah answered, “ I ’m here,” from over another billow in the 
far corner, lifting up cap and spectacles to meet him. 

“May I sit down here and have a talk?” 

“ Of course you may.” 

Over behind, in France’s corner, the hay rustled with a quick 
motion that only Miss Ammah could see ; and to that Miss 
Ammah replied with a clutch upon France’s foot that came 
through conveniently beside her. So France, bidden and up- 
holden, stayed still and listened. Eael was not noticing the 
sounds ; if he had been, they were common enough, and made 
part of the pleasantness in the dim, sweet old chambers, where 
the shy hens stole about to their hidden nests, and the brindle 
cat crept after barn-mice. 

“ I shall have to give up the Gilley bargain,” Rael said. 

Now, as the reader does not know what the Gilley bargain 
was, and Miss Tredgold did, and even France had heard of the 
plan of purchase, and as Rael is not likely, after the absurdity 
of some people in stories who are wholly under the author’s 
thumb, to tell it all over again to us across their shoulders, it is 
as well to say here that the Heybrooks had wanted for a long 
time, if they could only have spared the money, to straighten 
the west line of their farm to Little River, a branch of the 
great stream along whose valley the railroad ran ; by this 
means also to open a straight cut across what was now the 
“ Gilley home-piece,” below the Gilley wood-lot that had been 
bought in years ago to the Heybrook property, toward the 
railroad, at whose nearest wood-station Rael’s logs were to be 
delivered next winter. This w'ould cut off a long round by the 
highway ; it would enable Rael to begin cutting advantageously 
down there, instead of at the hither end of his large forest 
tract, whence the old cart-road came back and debouched upon 
the North Sudley turnpike. It would make a fine difference 
for him in his season’s work. 

Old Gilley had a son who wanted to go out to Montana with 
a young fellow who had fifteen hundred dollars to go out with; 


THE HAY-PARLOR. 


145 


if Hod Gilley could put in as much as five hundred to begin, 
and go on quarter share, they would make out together. Old 
Gilley would sell his little remaining tillage, and keep his 
house-place awhile on rent, working round himself at odd jobs 
on other people’s farms, until Hod should make sure out there ; 
then he would clear all out and go too. The Gilleys never had 
made out much in Fellaiden ; their laud had gone bit by bit ; but 
young Horace had taken the new start that a young sucker 
does sometimes take from an old stump, and people said he 
would come to something. 

Rael had made money last year with his wood, — eight him- 
dred, certain. Then the stock had turned in well ; a man had 
been about buying up sheep for Texas, and Rael had got good 
prices for his two-year Merinos and Saxonies. He could pay 
five hundred this fall, he thought, and make it stand him in. 

But now, he said, he should have to give it up. 

“You see. Miss Ammah, I’m morally sure of something now, 
that was n’t so likely before, and that Gilley don’t know a word 
of. There ’s talk again of a new branch up to Sudley ; and if 
they do that, they ’ll strike across west to the Rutland and Bur- 
lington, sure ; and the Sudley branch will have to run up Little 
River ; and right there, in the southwest corner of the Gilley 
piece, will have to be the new junction and a big depot. So 
you see it rather knocks my little plan.” 

“ I should think it made it all the better,” said Miss Ammah, 
simply, all on one side. 

“ Only I can’t afford to pay Gilley the price he ’d ask if he 
knew the chance,” said Rael, as simply, on the other side. 

“Oh!” said Miss Ammah. The “oh!” was rather aghast, 
and had a quiver of doubt in it. For the first time in her life. 
Miss Ammah entered into the interest of a question such as, 
with men, involves conscience and interest almost every day ; 
that is, when there is any conscience to be involved. 

“ But of course it is n’t sure,” she said. “ There has always 
been talk of it, every now and then. And it could n’t come to 
anything for a year or two. And the Gilleys want the money 
now, and the price of the land now is five hundred dollars. I 
don’t exactly see — ” 


10 


146 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


“ I thought I did n’t,” said Rael. “ At least, I thought I 
thought I did n’t. But I ’ve been all over it. The road has 
got to be, sooner or later. And they say some New York men 
have got hold of it, and they mean to put it through. The 
lake and mountain travel will cut right across, you see. It ’ll 
just open up this piece of the world ; but the first thing that 
will come in will be the railroad price for Gilley’s land, right 
straight up Little River. I know, by survey, they can’t start 
from anywhei’e else on the line, or go any other way.” 

“ People out in the speculating world are apt to think that 
they’ve a right to all the advantage they can come at by 
any superior knowledge or discernment,” said Miss Ammah. 
“ That ’s all the capital half of them begin with. And if they 
must give the benefit against themselves, where would the cap- 
ital bel” 

“ Where it was, I suppose,” said Rael. “ In the common- 
wealth.” 

“Ah ! ” said Miss Ammah, “ that ’s the commonwealth of Is- 
rael ! ” 

By this time France had got up in a straight sitting posture. 
Her elbows were on her knees, and her face was between her 
hands. Her two cheeks glowed like fire, and her eyes were like 
planets in a sunrise. 

“ He ’s as honest as the Great Pyramid ! ” she was saying to 
herself. 

“ Of course,” said Rael, “ nothing in this world is certain. I 
should n’t hardly dare to undertake the thing, paying the five 
hundred down, and a promise of half the difference in a fair 
valuation of the land one year or two years hencje, say. I 
might n’t make everything out ; and land don’t all sell at a 
particular price the very minute you know it ought to be 
worth it.” 

He certainly was speaking Great-Pyramid-fashion ; he did not 
even seem to recollect that there was no business fashion of the 
present day and region that would hold these words of his as 
common sense. 

“ Suppose you promised jt in your own mind,” said Miss Am- 
mah, “ to pay when the money really did come 1 ” 


THE HAY-PARLOR. 


147 


I would n’t trust my own mind to be the same,” said Rael. 
“ How could I tell 1 It would look different to me after I ’d 
had it for my own a year or two, may be. And who knows 
where he or I would be in that time, either, or what new no- 
tion of profit there might be to wait two or five, or ten years 
more fori No; the fair way is to pay something for the fair 
prospect now, and I can’t do that. It ’s an upset all round, 
anyway : it might upset Hod, and be just the spoiling of him, 
to put too much in his head about it, yet awhile. It might 
cheat him out of better than money. He ’s pretty near coming 
out a man, as it is, for all he ’s a Gilley. Five hundred dollars 
in hand would be the making of him, now ; but five thousand 
in the bush, and the bush anywhere from two to five years 
off, — well, I don’t think I could stand it, in his place, my- 
self.” 

“ I think you could stand anything,” came from France Ever- 
idge’s comer, in that strong tone of hers that evened itself in- 
stead of ejaculating. 

The three seconds’ pause after these words pointed them 
each way, as much as the utterance. Three seconds down for 
words to drop before they strike water sounds a pretty deep 
well of something that receives them, 

“ Thank you, Miss France. I did n’t know you were there. 
I ’m glad you are. I ’m very glad you were able to get here.” 

“ Oh, I ’m able, I hardly cared for my stick. I shall be 
everywhere again in a day or two.” 

“ Everywhere will be happy to have you,” said Rael Hey- 
brook, as gracefully as a gentleman. 

“Mr. Rael,” said France, “if you measure everything by 
pyramid inch, which is a thousandth part bigger than other 
people’s-inches, don’t you see, — in the long run, — ” 

“ You ’ll come out ahead 1 ” Rael finished with a laugh. 

“ One way,” said the girl. “ But in the way of the world — ” 

“You’ll have got left out in the coldl” he ended again. 
“ Well, I ’ve a mind to try that and see. Miss Ammah, that 
land is cheap, anyway, at five hundred. It lays as pretty to 
the south as land can, and those meadows cut the best grass, — 
and the maple lot up next our woods, — why, to say nothing 


148 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


of a depot right there, with a good stock of cows, and a 
sugar-works, such as they’ve got up at Still Pond, — a man 
need n’t go to Montana, or anywhere else, to turn things 
round.” 

“ I dare say you said that much to Hod Gilley in the first 
of it.” 

“ Yes. I could n’t take the advantage of his not seeing clear 
through that thing.” 

“ All right,” said Miss Tredgold. “ But I don’t suppose you 
need pay him for the fact that you do see, and that you ’ve 
got the faculty for carrying it through. I might as well pay at 
the worsted store for this thing that I know I can make out of 
their fifteen-cent yarn.” And Miss Ammah held up her pretty 
shawl-work, of a pattern that the worsted store certainly does 
not know. 

“ Or an artist at the color-shop for his thousand-dollar pic- 
ture,” said France Everidge; “or the railroad for ten years’ 
travel over the land they cut through.” 

Rael laughed. “ Hod is bound to go to Montana, and have 
a twelve-hundred-acre field of wheat,” he said. “ And he hasn’t 
got the money at present for cows or sugar-works ; but the 
money ’s there, for a little cash, or smartness, to start it out 
with. Only, now, if the railroad comes, and the town road is 
cut through from Lower Village to Sudley Corner, it ’s a chance 
if five hundred would buy two acres of it — some parts — in a 
few years. And that ’s getting more than a fair calculation, 
unless you let him calculate too.” 

“ Let him calculate,” said Miss Ammah, diving after her 
ivory crochet-needle with which she had been thoughtfully stab- 
bing the hay-mow, and which had nearly slipped away from her 
down an unsuspected crevasse, “let him know the whole 
chance, — and the chanciness, — and then send him to me. 
I’ve got an idle thousand dollars just now; and I’ve always 
coveted a piece of glory-property up here in the hills. Only I 
have n’t felt a right to invest, just for the delight of my eyes, 
in what might n’t do much good after me. I ’ll make a bargain 
with him if you say so, and then I ’ll make a bargain with 
you. You shall hire the land, and take your way through it, 


THE HAY-PARLOE. 


149 


and spend your five hundred on your cows and your sugar- 
works, on a ten years’ lease, for five per cent interest. And 
I ’ll come up here every year and look on. And there sha’ n’t 
be a village there at Little River Point, either. 1 don’t w'ant 
villages on my land ; I want the river and the hills and the 
meadows and the maple-groves ; a piece of creation, you see, — 
let alone as much as it can be. They can spread out their 
* junction on the other side if they want to; and they may 
liave their depot in the corner under the red rocks, if they 
must ; it won’t show from the house. And that house of 
Gilley’s, — why, it could just be fixed up, — Rael, it would be 
fine ! ” 

“Who fori” asked Rael, with his pleasant laugh again. 
“ Miss Ammah, I must n’t take the advantage of you. I 
mustn’t let you dream away your thousand dollars all in one 
minute.” 

“For me,” said Miss Ammah, who always answered cate- 
gorically. “ Or for you. And as to my thousand dollars, ain’t 
I going to make it ojther jive some time 1 ” 

“ Not if you keep the meadows to look at or to hire out for 
five per cent.” 

“ There ’s more than one way of burying in the ground,” said 
Miss Ammah. 

Then Rael stood up on the top stair where he had been 
sitting. 

“ Miss Ammah,” he said, with his tall bead a little bent, so 
that the lines of sunshine played across the brown lines of it, 
and holding his hat between his hands where he looked down, 
“ this is n’t the least how I thought the talk I wanted was 
going to end. I sha’ n’t thank you now, for thanking you would 
seem to take it, and take is n’t so easy on the minute as give. 
1 ’d rather you ’d think it over, and if you never say a word 
more about it, I sha’ n’t feel it strange. Something else may 
come to your mind that does n’t now. I would n’t want any 
great favor by a surprise. All the same, I do thank you for 
ever thinking of such a thing for a minute.” And so, with one 
sidewise step downward, he turned on the stairs, put his hat on 
as he turned, and went down. 


150 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


“I’ll take three days,” said Miss Ammah to France, “ to let 
him get used to it in. My thinking is done. I ’m not such a 
sudden sort of a woman as he supposes.” 

France sat silent. Her thinking was in the very middle. 
She was not of a sudden sort either. She had but half come to 
any understanding of herself. 


THE DAM PASTURE. 


151 


CHAPTER XVII. 

THE DAM PASTURE. 

It was just as Dr. Fargood had promised. The thorough rest 
which France had taken had let her knee get strong again, 
almost without her knowing it. 

“ I believe I could have walked anywhere a week ago,” she 
said to Miss Ammah the morning after she had made that first 
journey with a stick, over into the hay bam, and discovered 
that the stick was of no consequence whatever. “ I am going 
to begin to scour the woods again.” 

“ He told you you might have your liberty after three weeks,” 
said Miss Ammah. 

“ And the three weeks are up on Thursday. On Friday I 
will go with Sarell over the dam.” 

That sounded like an extreme proposition ; but over the dam 
was simply across the river by the High Mills to some great 
pastures that stretched up the oak ridges lying along the foot 
of Thumble. 

The river was everywhere ; it wound east and south and 
west of the farm, and joined the great straight north and south 
stream at Creddle’s Mills, seven miles below. The High Mills 
were paper manufactories ; they made there a certain kind of 
coarse brown pasteboard, for which they used oat-straw. France 
had gone there one day to see the works. What had charmed 
her far more than the works, however, had been the wild bed 
of the stream below the dam, filled with great boulders, some of 
them tall jagged needles, some huge rounds with slopes that could 
be climbed ; between were flats and gentle inclines of smooth- 
worn slabs, with chains and broken heaps of stepping-stones lying 
in the channels and pools in v.'hich the shallow water spread 
itself and stole about, — wandering strange and dispossessed 


152 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


where it had once wildly rushed and boiled, — from the back-water 
of the mill-tail, and the slow drip between the craggy foundations 
of the dam. That structure itself stretched across some eighty or 
ninety feet from the flume-head to the opposite bank, and rose 
twenty -five feet high from the rocky bed below. Above lay the 
broad, still w^ater, deep from edge to edge of its thicket-fringed 
banks. 

Now, in the wide, pleasant pastures beyond, the blueberries 
wei’e in perfection ; all the way over the ridges and up Thumble 
they grew in wild patches, open to the high sun, and tangled 
among them here and there were the bush-blackberry vines, on 
which the long, beautiful, sweet cones of fruit were turning to 
their glossy ripeness. Sarell had “ been going ” for a week past 
for a regular long day’s picking, for plentiful fresh supplies and 
for a big “ preserving.” 

“You can go as well as not,” said Sarell, sliding the last 
plateful of hot biscuits in among a sociable group of other 
breakfast dishes. The perfect setting of a country table is to 
make it look as if nothing else could be crowded in ; therefore 
the first half dozen things are begun with in a bunch like the 
Pleiades. “ Lyme ’ll drive us down to the bars with the buck- 
board ; an’ he or some of ’em can come along an’ take us up 
again ’fore sundown. You won’t have to walk a mite more ’n 
you ’re a min’ to. ’T ain’t nothin’ goin’ across the river, either 
way.” 

“Too, it’ll be bakin’ mornin’, Friday,” said Mrs. Heybrook, 
adding the brimming pitcher of yellow cream to the spreading 
constellation, “ an’ you c’n have nice fresh victuals for your 
dinner. We’ll be all through, Sarell an’ I, ’fore you’ll want 
to go, an’ then you ’ll have a couple of hours before the heat o’ 
the day sets in. When you ’re there you won’t care. There ’s 
the nicest shady places you ever see, — oak clumps, an’ here ’n 
there great solid pines, two or three together, a hundred years 
old. It ’s alwers cool under the pines.” 

So, at ten on the Friday morning, with tin pails, full now of 
turnovers, doughnuts, crackles, as Mother Heybrook called cer- 
tain crisp bread-wafers of hers that were done on the clean brick 
floor of the oven every baking-day, and cheese, both ripe and m 


THE DAM PASTURE. 


153 


little snowy balls of fresh sweet curd that France delighted in ; 
with a peck -basket for the berries, and a small strapped shopping- 
basket of France’s that held a book, a sketching block and pen- 
cils, and some of her wool-work, the two young women set off 
together on the buck-board, with Lyman for driver, to spend a 
whole summer’s day together, with only the birds and the sun- 
shine and the butterflies, the wind and the running water, the 
rocks, the sweet waving ferns and grasses, and the sturdy, 
generous fruit-bushes for other company. 

“Safel” repeated Mother Heybrook to Miss Ammah’s ques- 
tion. “ It ’s just as safe as heaven. There ’s nobody there but 
the Lord and his own creators. It ’s full water at the mills, 
an’ it’s oat-harvest with the farm folks, an’ the berry-children, 
even, don’t get over that way much. . They ’ll have it all to 
themselves, an’ I guess it ’s a clear treat to both of ’em. Those 
two never ’ll find much better days than they ’re a seein’ now,” 
the good soul added with innocent indiscrimination, as they 
drove from the door, where the elder women stood to see them 
off. “ They don’t know it though. They ’re lookin’ forrud, I 
s’pose, like all the young fools before ’em. Sarell ’s a real likely 
girl herself. Miss Ammah, an’ she ought to look out an’ do well. 
But that Hollis ! too, his looks may misreppersent him, but I 
dorCt believe he ’s smart, — not her kind ; but there I we can’t 
reggerlate it. An’ ain’t it good that France is whole-footed 
again 1 ” 

There was something in Mother Heybrook’s words that con- 
veyed an obscure kind of sympathetic comfort to Miss Tredgold. 
Her responsibilities, also, were lifted off her shoulders for one 
day at any rate. For to-day, in the solitary pastures, it was 
“ as safe as heaven ” for F ranee Everidge. She wondered what 
the minister would say if he walked over this afternoon and 
found her gone 1 

“ It ’s worth sitting still three weeks to find out how lovely it 
is to rush round again !” said France, as she sprang from the buck- 
board, taking care, however, to come down on the sure foot. 

Before them was a low bar-place, letting in from the roadside 
to a clumpy bush-growth, through which a narrow path w’as 
beaten. Down a bank, this path ran to the river margin, just 


154 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


above the high dam. They heard Lyman rattle off down the 
remainder of the hill with the buck-board as they entered a 
sweet-scented pine shade along the cre^t of the bank, through 
which the footway branched to the right and ran along to the 
mill buildings some eighth of a mile further down, shut in a 
deep hollow, where the river-bed turned again. Lyman would 
cross the river here, by the mill bridge. The road followed along 
on the further side to the village, where he had an errand. 

Sarell, the peck-basket on her arm in which were stowed 
the tin dinner-pails that they were to unpack and then use for 
their picking, led the way out of the pine belt, down through 
a fringe of elder and dogwood. Presently the clear water 
gleamed at their feet, and across it, over the head-gate of the 
i-aceway, and from that straight on to the opposite, seemingly 
far-off shore, stretched the solid line of timber that topped the 
dam, about a foot and a half wide, — a little more, perhaps, — 
dry and smooth. The water was all running through the sluice 
of the flume, for the gates were up and the mills busy. On the 
left, the sloping planks ran down into the mill-pond, bare for a 
couple of feet, at most to the water level. This, smooth and 
sunshiny, lay backward spread for a rod or two, against where 
a slight natural fall over a low face of ledge gave the first im- 
petus to the current which had once hurled itself down here in 
a real cataract. On the right was the cataract^skeleton, the 
sheer descent, and those bare, upward-pointing rocks. 

Sarell made straight for the dam. 

France, with her basket and her waterproof, followed her un- 
til she saw her set foot on the timber, independently broad, but 
relatively so narrow, that lay across between the still river and 
the bare, frightful rocks below. 

“ Sarell ! ” she cried, “ what are you going to do?” 

“ Go over, to be sure. Did n’t we come to 1 ” 

“ Over there 1 So “I ” 

“ It ’s the easiest way. I always do. But you can climb 
across, down there, if you like,” and Sarell pointed down, rather 
contemptuously, into the gorge. “ There ’s a plank-way over 
the flume, a few steps that way, and a pitchy little path down 
the bank, — if you don’t mind your knee.” 


THE DAM PASTURE. 155 

“ Oh, come ! ” entreated France. “ It ’s so much prettier 
that way,” 

“ That ’s exactly what you don’ know,” said Sarell. “You 
never stood on the middle, there, with the whole river spreadin’ 
up one side, like a great sky lookin’-glass, an’ the rocks tumbled 
together underneath the otlier, clear down through the gully to 
the Mill Holler an’ the Thumble Bend.” 

“ Of course it ’s beautiful, but I never was up in the air with 
an eagle, either,” said France. “Don’t be an eagle or a king- 
fisher, Sarell ! Come down with me ! Be tame, please ! ” 

Sarell walked on a little way, just not to be too tame, and to 
show France her free poise on her high standing-place, then she 
turned and indifferently strolled back again. 

“ Jest as you say,” she said ; and they crossed the flume and 
went down the side path, where the hardback and the plumy 
white meadow-queen grew, among elders rich with their wine- 
storing berries, and glossy dogwood, tempting and treacherous 
to the touch, 

Down among the rocks it was lovely, if ignominiously safe. 
“ Don’t hurry ! ” said France. “ It ’s too — wonderful — to go 
away from.” She instated herself upon a beautiful sculptured 
throne, where the ancient waters had scooped out the hollow 
seat, and smoothed the pleasant incline of the back, and even 
left a footstool just where a footstool should be. High and dry 
above any water level that had been for years, its top and sides 
were dimpled and furrowed and grooved in a tracery of bold 
natural carving, and the mosses had enamelled and filagreed 
them with gray and green ; and overhead a great jutting frag- 
ment, wedged fast between yet higher heaps, held its horizontal 
canopy above her, shading her from the down-pouring sunlight. 

At her feet, below the rocky footstool, ran a shallow ripple of 
translucent water, which she had just stepped across. Golden- 
rods, springing in the clefts at either hand, were just bursting 
•their feathery tips into glory, and catnip blossoms, around 
which wild bees were whirling, held up small, sweet heads from 
a little islet patch of weedy green close by. The high banks 
and their heavy thickets shut in all like walls, which the tow- 
ering structure of the dam, above, and the precipitous front of 


156 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


Thumble Bend, — an outstretching spur of the mountain mass 
itself, — beyond the mills, joined with cross ramparts that left 
no seeming outlet anywhere, except upward, where the crows 
flew over, and drifts of scattered white clouds slowly sailed east- 
ward in the blue rift. 

A little way down from where she sat, the mill-wheels reared 
and smote with their dripping blades, and the foamy water 
swept back from their chastisement to quiet itself in lessening 
surges till it turned away among the stones in another path, 
and found its onward way again, like a life from out some shat- 
tering experience, into placid meadow reaches for a while, till it 
came to other mill-wheels, and the grasp and whirl and bewil- 
derment of a new catastrophe laid hold of it again. 

Sarell put down her basket and her pails, found a resting 
place, and waited. She had seen enough of France, already, 
to know that when she sat down that way, and “ went into 
things,” herself, or whoever the other person might be, would 
have to wait. 

The things were entering into France; the depth of the 
earth-chasm, the tossed, tumultuous rocks, the withdrawn 
height and peace of the blue day, the quiet humbleness of the 
growing things that made their home here, the obedient, suf- 
fering, escaping waters, the cool sweetness and apartness of 
this strange place whence the natural flow and current had 
been diverted, — said things to her as in syllables of some half- 
comprehended tongue, which she knew only enough to discern 
a deep, signiflcant sound in, and to lay up as a kind of haunting 
rhythm, in involuntary memory, to come back to her when sht 
should have power to translate it fully. 

At last Sarell said, with an elaborate meekness, “ Ther ’s 
berries up in the lot, you know, I s’pose ; an’ I ’ve a mistrustin’ 
recollection ’t we come to pick ’em.” 

To which France answered, wuth a dreamy sort of penitence, 
“You poor thing!” and dreamily descended from her throne, 
and turned to^vard the southern bank. 

Climbing that, they came into the sunny pasture. A great 
flood of sweet air met them, wholly other than the air below, 
full of ferny balm and minty redolence, and breaths of pines 


THE DAM PASTUEE. 157 

that were steeped in warmth and moved softly in the thousand- 
perfumed wind. 

And such a hush ! Such a summer brooding of the great 
sky (was it anything of that same sky that held itself so far 
away from the beautiful, deep, broken gorge beneath ] ) over 
the lovely wilderness that was lifting up its thank-offering of 
prodigal fruitage far and wide. 

France sat down again within a little circle of low bushes, on 
the crisp, tawny grass. All around her tiny branches bent, 
blue with crowding berries, doing all they could in the teeming, 
hungry earth. A wild bird startled from a nest among some 
tall, sweet ferns, and, peering in, France saw four little eggs, 
the promise of some second brood. An emperor-butterfly set- 
tled on a stem and floated off again, with staggering wings just 
unfolded from their chrysalis ; and again the crows flew over, 
chanting their rough note, but here they only made a mighty 
peace more peaceful, wafting their long, slow way across a lim- 
itless sweet heaven. 

White birches gathered in groups, — sociable little gossipy 
trees that they are, — whispered to each other continually with 
their silvery, light-hung leaves ; underneath, the prettiest little 
miniature things just like them, each perfect in branching 
and proportion, were springing up to be the birches of a gay 
society by and by. The ground was fresh and glistening with 
them, and other lovely new beginnings of forest life. 

Here and there a great oak stood solitary, like a strong, 
thoughtful soul reaching up to the clearest airs of heaven and 
drinking deep from the purest fountains of the earth ; holding 
fast with the under-nature to that in which it was set to grow, 
and spreading forth live, free perceptions to touch and assimi-. 
late the sunlight and all its invisible forces. 

Pine copses skirted and islanded the pasture. Mixed with 
their spicy, dense verdure was the shining luxuriance of laurel, 
that six weeks ago had been robed in pink, covered from crown 
to root with its great clusters of wax-like, rosy cups. Among 
the moss and pine needles, tiniest running vines, matted into 
firm tapestry, carpeted with wonderful evenness the shades* 
floors of many a sweet wood-parlor. 


158 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


Sarell was urging her way already through the thickly grow- 
ing fruit-jungles; the drop of the berries had long ceased to 
sound on the tin bottom of her broad pail. The doughnuts 
and turnovers were stowed safely in the cool of one of those 
little pine-tree bowers, where they would eat their luncheon by 
and by. 

France began, of conscience, to be industrious. She grew 
fascinated with her gathering ; the large, bloomy-blue clusters 
fell from their stems at her first touch, raining down into her 
pail, until she too had passed beyond the rattling stage of mere 
commencement into the full, silent, steady accomplishment of 
undoubted work. The finger-tips, used to dexterous fine hand- 
lings, moved nimbly at their new task, perhaps scattering less 
than the more forceful grasp of Sarell’s ; and the farm-maiden, 
who was a famous picker, was surprised when the city damsel 
came round at the same moment with .herself to empty the 
“quart kettle ” into the peck basket. 

“ It won’t take us time enough,” she said. “ We might as 
good ’s calc’lated on a ha’af bush’l.” 

“ I ’ve my straw basket,” said France. “ And here are the 
pails themselves. And we could even make a pile of berries on 
the moss, and let Lyman come back for it.” 

“ Should n’t be a mite astonished if we did. An’ then vfe 
sh’ll hev’ to leave all Oak Ridge and Thumble. It ’s a turrible 
country for beiTies, in the years of ’em. Why, over there in 
the chestnut runs, right between the two villages, is enough to 
more ’n satisfy the folks ; so ’s ’t they hardly ever take the 
trouble to come here, ’less it ’s for a reggl’r picnic party once in 
a while. But I tell you these berries is jest a acAm’ t’ be 
•picked. I can’t more ’n look at ’em ’fore they ’re in the kittle.” 

“ I wonder what so many are made for ! ” exclaimed France. 

“ Lor ! it ’s no use wond’rin’ about that,” said Sarell. “ Ef 
you ’re goin’ t’ begin, you ’ll hafter keep on. ’Ts a wonder t’ 
me what ha’af the folks was made for, let alone berries.” 

Sarell spoke with her mouth full. France was picking, deli- 
cately and dutifully, without so much as remembering that 
there was plenty of fruit for eating also. But it is one of the 
minute differences that high human civilization has made, that 


THE DAM PASTURE. 


159 


its advance breeding results in a creature who has forgotten the 
instinct of browsing, and adheres only to the periodical cere- 
mony of eating, to which its necessity has become reduced. 

When their dinner time came, however, France was delight- 
fully hungry. The peck basket was almost full ; the sun was 
high, and the very birds were nooning in the thickets. She 
and Sarell withdrew into their pine parlor. Of all their great 
outdoor palace, they chose one small, secluded chamber led to 
by a long green gallery that wound slightly as it threaded 
inward from the open hillside to this cool depth. A thousand 
beautiful growing embroideries and hangings adorned and 
clothed its still and fresh interior. One broad old stump, 
embossed with lichens and moss-evened to a table-level, served 
for their setting forth of food, and the vine-knit slope about it, 
clean from the least rubbish or decay, gave them seats. Tlie 
close weaving of the branches, with the finer crossings and 
interfacings of millions of spiny leaves, shut out the heat, and 
evidently kept the rains from dripping in so as to soak where 
they could not easily have evaporated. Therefore it was dry 
and sweet, and only the things that grow in such dry shadow 
had got habilitated there, but these in their daintiest perfec- 
tion. 

“ I did n’t know there could be such a place, — happening to 
be, of itself,” said France. 

“ There ’s lots more things that happen than you could bring 
to pass if you tried,” said sententious Sarell. 

After which, their thoughts perhaps going apart on different 
trails, they addressed themselves to their repast. 

However blessedly hungry, fifteen minutes of actual eating 
suffice a properly proportioned human being; therefore, long 
before their fair noon-spell was finished, they had ended dinner, 
and France had neatly secured the remnants in Mrs. Heybrook’s 
homespun napkin. 

Sarell picked a fern-branch and sat in a meditative fashion, 
her feet drawn up a little under her, and her knees elevated, 
upon which she rested her wrists, while she slowly and carefully 
drew the separate green fronds through her fingers; turning 
and scrutinizing them in a very examining way, yet with an 


160 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


unmistakable air of the examination being only illustrative; 
the real analysis and deliberation going on within her. 

“ I ’ve a good min’ to tell you,” she began, with slower speech 
than usual, and in that tone which seems to sound from below 
the ready surface, and then she stopped. If she had been in 
France’s place, she would have known that she was expected to 
say “Well?” and that then France would have gone on, 
France did not say “Well?” she only turned her head civilly 
toward her companion, and left her to her free will. So Sarell 
had to begin again. 

“ They happen faster than you want to bring ’em to pass, if 
they once get a goin’.” 

After a moment’s marvel, France was able to join these to 
the anteprandial words, and to perceive that Sarell reverted 
to “things.” Also that she could not mean natural growths 
or conformations, such as their present surroundings, which 
they had commented upon. 

“ What do ? ” she asked, relieving very evident expectation 
this time ; and Sarell, getting her catechizing cue, which was to 
her as the pitch-pipe note, or the choir leader’s do-sol-fa to the 
village singers, started off. 

“Well, f’ one thing, — Elviry Scovill ’s goin’ t’ leave the 
deac’n’s. Her sister ’s goin’ t’ git merried this fall, an’ she ’s 
got t’ go home ’n see t’ the oT folks. Deac’n Amb, he ’s in a 
tiew.” Sarell paused here again ; she told her story like old 
Saltpetre getting up a hill. There was a water-bar after every 
little pull. 

“ Y’ see ’t he ’s hed a kind of a poor spell ; ’n he don’ know 
what t’ make of it; f’r he hed n’t allowed f’r anything like 
that t’ll he was a good ninety-eight ’n a half ; f’r his father, he 
was six mont’s a failin’, an’ he died when he was ninety-nine 
an’ six days, an’ never ’d hed a day’s pulldown all his life afore. 
So it all cuts right into the deac’n’s plans, y’ see ; an’ Mother 
Pemble — well, her eyes is a shinin’ ! ” 

“ I don’t think I know much about the family,” said France 
politely. “ It is ‘ Uncle Amb,’ is n’t it ?” 

“ I sh’d say ’t was. An’ a beautiful kind ’f ’n uncle he ’s ben 
t’ the boys ! I ’d jest like to uncle him ; an’ I will, too, ef 
things don’t happen too fast.” 


THE DAM PASTURE. 161 

France began to feel a fresher interest, as Sarell’s words 
flowed more animatedly, and her subject enlarged, 

“An’ Hollis Bassett, he told me las’ Sunday, that the ol’ 
man was actilly goin’ t’ give him shares, at last ; beginnin’ in 
the winter, of course, t’ count work. Now Hollis, he ’s a kind 
’f a goose, — ’bout some things, — an’ he can ’t more ’n ha’af 
make up his mind, — or make up his ha’af of a mind, whichever 
’t is,” said Sarell, laughing awkwardly. “ He ’s got possessed 
about keepin’ store, — did y’ ever hear of sech a thing ’s a forty- 
nine-cent store, France 1 ” 

“No, I certainly never did,” said France, keeping eyes and 
lips grave, and finding herself half amused, half impatient, 
with Sarell’s wandering confidences. But a good deal could be 
borne with, or passively permitted, in the prevailing delicious- 
ness of the day and place, 

“ Well, he ’s all in a coniption t’ be a mercantyle man. An’ 
he thinks he c’n begin that way. I tell him, — he kinder comes 
t’ me f’r — ” 

Sarell was about to say “encouragement.” But the word 
stopped her, and she did not at the instant think of another. 

“For that other half of his mind?” asked France demurely. 

“ Well, p’raps so. Two heads is better ’n one, y’ know. He 
kinder talks things over, an’ I tell him ’t ain’t neither a trade 
nor a callin’. ’T ain’t a man’s full business, now, is it. Miss 
France 1” The word of respect might be accidental or propitia- 
tive. Sarell evidently wanted some light or some upholding. 
She looked anxiously at Miss Everidge, and a sudden movement 
of her fingers stripped all the pretty fronds from the fem-stem, 
and left it a very bare fact in her hand. She began to trace 
the pattern of her print gown with it, as the dress lay smoothed 
across her knee. 

“I am puzzled sometimes, Sarell, about bigger things than 
that, to know whether they are trades or callings, or any busi- 
ness at all for a man, in this world,” France answered. And 
that, as yet, did not help Sarell at all. 

“Standin’ behind a counter, an’ passin’ things acrost, an’ 
takin’ in change, ain’t eveiy thing. What ’s he made or satisfied 
or turned over 'i That ’s what I ’d like t’ know, ’bout ’n ocker- 

11 


162 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


pation said Sarell. “ ’T ain’t clear respectable, I don’t think, 
’less he doos one or t’ other.” 

“ I think you ’re perfectly right,” returned France. “ But 
there are cities full of people who don’t do any better; who 
only stand between, — no, they dorCt stand between ! ” she 
ixclaimed, with an instantly larger perception of the word; 
and Sarell went on. 

“Now, ’f a man plants a field o’ beans, an’ weeds ’em, an’ 
hoes ’em, an’ poles ’em up, he ’s a doin’ somethin’; an’ when he 
gethers ’em, then ther ’s them more beans in the world. But 
jest t’ buy a few ready-made notions, an’ take a cent ofif a price 
they ain’t ha’af wuth, an’ then rig up a shop an’ stan’ an’ ped- 
dle ’em out to folks that don’t want ’em, but only tickle 
therselves with savin’ a cent a spendin’ forty-nine, — sha ! a man 
need n’t know beans t’ do that ! ” 

The unschooled speech set France to thinking. It reminded 
her of that talk with Miss Ammah, among her sisters, long ago, 
when she had said that only to he middling was to be mean ; 
but to serve between was what every human creature was made 
and placed to do. Long ago 1 It was not three months. What 
made it seem so long ago to France 1 Was it some of those 
reality measures she had of late been learning 1 These thoughts 
kept her silent for a minute or two. 

“Well?” said Sarell, which in Yankee means, according to 
punctuation, either, “ Now I speak, and here’s my mind, or my 
story,” or “ Speak you, I ’m waiting.” 

“ I think,” said France, “ that to find out your real between- 
ness is the great puzzle and all the good of living. I don’t 
believe there is anything else meant by putting us here.” 

“ Now you talk like Mr. Kingsworth. Ain’t he an odd one, 
for a minister? ” 

“ Is he ? ” asked France. 

“ Well,” Sarell replied, “ I never see one like him. Y’ jest 
can’t git red ’v him ; ’cause he ’s all round, and ain’t any two 
sides.” 

“ What can you mean ? ” 

“ Well, I was n’t sett’n out to talk over the minister, but I 
don’t mind stoppin’ t’ say that he ain’t allers either fellership- 


THE DAM PASTURE. 


163 


pin’ or exhortin’. That ’s the two sides they most of ’em start 
out on. They ’re like the two rails of a railroad ; an’ y’ can’t 
git off /the regg’lar track, ’less y’ upset altogether. It’s all 
saints, or all sinners ; and the minister ’s either got t’ talk Zion 
with the perfessors, or brimstone ’n everlastin’ — swear — with 
the unconverted. But Mr. Kingsworth, he ’a all round. He 
says things that jest ketches either way, ’n y’ can’t tell whether 
it ’s the saint-side or the sinner-side of y’u ’t he ’s got hold of. 
An’ I don’t see but what you ’re jest the same, with y’r ‘ be- 
tweenness.’ D’ ye mean y’ think everybody ’s a between, an’ 
there ain’t no sheep, nor goats, nor nothin’ settled 1 ” 

“ I was n’t talking about religion particularly,” said France. 
“ I meant,” — and she quoted Miss Ammah’s own definition, — 
“ that everybody is between somebody and somebody else; to 
do some real service, I suppose, and fill some real place, or else 
they are not in any true place at all.” 

“Ait' you religious 1” Sarell asked the tremendous question 
as if it were not tremendous at all. It might be a little deli- 
cate and personal ; but personal questions are asked by the 
simple country-folk on all subjects of common relation and 
concern, of which the right-and-left in religion is as much one 
as the side in politics, or one’s state in life, as single or mar- 
ried, town-dweller or country-dweller. 

France had never been asked such a question before in all 
her life. She had hardly asked it of herself She had sup- 
posed, or taken for granted she supposed, that she was on 
the same track with everybody else, — a track of gradual 
progress, which was to end in full enlightenment and, perhaps, 
righteousness. She had never taken her spiritual latitude and 
longitude under the noonday sun. 

“ I don’t know,” she answered briefly. “ I don’t know alto- 
gether what religion is.” 

And Sarell replied then quite simply, but yet more tremen- 
dously than before, “ Oh well, you ain’t then, of course, ’ and 
immediately returned to the secular subjects under discussion, 
as if a certain practical freemasonry were established, and she 
could now quite freely and comfortably get forward with them. 

“ Well, a forty-nine-cent store ain’t fairly between anything 


1G4 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


’s I can see, any moi’e th’n a man with an extry pitchfork be- 
tween two that ’s a pitchin’ an’ a loadin’ hay. It ’s jest por- 
tendin’ a place, ’n ketchin’ a few mean straws that drop on the 
way.” 

“ I think you are quite right,” said France. 

“/tell him so,” said Sarell complacently. “ An’ moreover, 
there ’s his place up to Uncle Amb’s where he ’d leave a actooil 
hole, bigger ’n he knows on ; f ’r ’f he did n’t stay there — ” 
But here, apparently, Sarell got a little ahead of her subject, 
and broke off, to go on with, “ Y’ see. Mis’ Heybrook, she takes 
on ’bout my doing well. Well, ain’t I, or would n’t I, supposin’ 1 
He ain’t not a great man, to be sure, say f’r takin’ the lead ; 
but, see here ! ef you ’r agoin’ t’ hitch tandem, an’ y’u must in 
this world, y’ can’t put hoik horses ahead, can y’u % I don’t 
look out s’ much f’r smartness in a man. A man wants t’ be 
stiddy a woman, round the house, with forty things runnin’ 
one over the other’s hee|s, she ’s got to be smart ; but a man, 
with only one regg’lar thing ’t a time, c’n take it mod’rit. Now 
Hollis, he ’s real amiest an’ innersunt, f’r all his good clo’es ’n 
kind o’ style ; an’ he c’n be kep stiddy. That ’s what I want 
a man t’ be, — stiddy an’ awnest an’ innersunt. The’ ain’t 
many of ’em innersunt, is ther’. Miss France 1 ” 

France, not being able to answer for many of them, either 
way, did not answer at all. She only smiled, which she could 
not well help; and Sarell, with such encouragement, proceeded. 

“Now, y’ see, it ’s best f’r him all ways t’ keep on ’t Uncle 
Amb’s, an’ spesh’lly ’cause ’v the ol’ lady. ’F ’t wa’n’t f’r nothin’ 
else, I sh’d hev t’ go back there on account ’v her, f’r I don’t 
b’lieve anybody but me ’s got hold ’v the right string t’ unsnarl 
things that ’s got to be unsnarled. An’ they ’re all mixed up 
with this fem’ly, too, y’ see : that ’s where it clenches me. I 
don’t care f’r nothin’ else : ’t might go t’ grass, f’r me. But 
Uncle Amb, he ’s the one Mr. Heybrook took the li’bility fer, 
that got this farm under morgidge. Ev’rybody don’t know 
that, but I know it. But all the town b’lieves he ’s got money 
now, an’ I know where he ’d ought t’ pay up. An’ if anything 
happened, it ’d hev to be looked out fer. That ol’ catamount, 
she ’s watchin’, layin’ right by the hole ; an’ she ’s a rubbin’ 


THE DAM PASTURE. 


165 


. — ’t ain’t the finger-j’ints alone all that liniment goes enter, — 
an’ she ’s a limberin’ herself ; and you ’ll see how bedrid she ’ll 
be when the time comes. An’ somebody ’s got t’ know jest 
when she starts. So I ’m bound t’ keep on there, an’ be farm^ 
woman, whether Hollis is farmer or not, till it’s settled, ef I 
don’t never live in a white house in a village, with green blinds 
to it, ’n a name on a door-plate ! ” 

She had told all this for France’s opinion upon it, of course. 
When France sat silent, a mere recipient, she urged her desire. 

“ Ain’t I in the right on ’t, don’t you think 1 Ain’t it a 
betweenness, ’cordin’ t’ you 1 ” 

“ Possibly,” returned France, with caution. “ If you are sure 
about Mr. Bassett ; caring for him, I mean.” 

“ ’V course I care f’r him. That ’s jest what I mean t’ do. 
He ’s too good t’ be thro wed away.” 

“ Only, yourself, Sarell. Are you sure you never would 
wish — ” 

“ Folks can’t be sure what they never would wish. Never 
means ’n all circumstahnces, ’s much ’a> alwers, ’n y’ don’t git 
all circumstahnces ’n this world. Y’ must take what comes t’ 
y’u. What would y’ do, ’f you ’s in my place 1 ” asked Sarell 
point-blank, seeing, perhap.s, that she had too apparently closed 
the argument on her side. 

“0 Sarell, how can I tell 1 You see, T should n’t be in your 
place, unless I were you ; and then, of course, it would be you 
that would decide, not I, as it has to be now. I think least of 
all can one woman put herself in the place of another in these 
things.” 

“ Well, I kinder wanted,” said Sarell, “ to tell ‘t out to one 
o’ my own sort, y’ see. Mis’ Heybrook, she ’s old, and so ’s 
Miss Ammah ; an’ I ain’t got anybody that belongs t’ me to go 
to, but what ’s merried ; an’ oT folks and merried folks can’t put 
therselves ’n your place. They ’ve worked it out, ’n they know 
too much. Y’u want somebody that ’s facin’ the same way you 
be t’ see your track ; they can’t by lookin’ round over ther 
shoulders. ’F you sh’d undertake t’ come out jest where they 
air, y’ might git clear into the swamp ! ” 

“ Sarell, did you ever know two women handle their hair the 
same way exactly, even to make the same kind of a twist 1” 


166 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


“No; I ’ve took notice o’ that, an’ it’s queer, too.” 

“ They don’t handle their lives alike, any more ; and yet 
every one of us is wanting substantially the same thing. I 
could n’t twist up my hair your way, nor you mine.” 

“ Wish ’t I could,” said Sarell. “ Yourn alwers looks as if 
’t had curled round and fastened itself so, jest like a vine. 
Mine, — lor, it ’s like a vine that ’s ben tore down, an’ can’t be 
got up again, any way. The ’s kinks enough, but they all turn 
contrary.” 

“ Now we have come round to toilet matters, I wonder if 
there ’s any place nearer than the river, where we could get 
some water to drink, and then wash our hands 1 ” 

“ ’V course, there ’s a brook right here. Ther alwers is, in 
Fellaiden. Hark ! Don’t y’ hear it, down below there, 
among the stones 1 We ’ll go in a minute. I jest want t’ 
ask y’u one thing more. What d’ ye think I ’d best ’pear 
out with!” 

“Peer out!” asked France, totally puzzled, and doing her 
mental spelling wrong. 

“ Yes, walk pride,” said Sarell. “ Don’t they walk pride in 
the cityl Fust Sunday, y’ know. Louisy Huland, she had 
blue, so I can’t. Pink ’s pretty, but it don’t go with my hair. 
An’ green — well, a good, rich grass-green might do ; only 
they ’d play ther jokes, some of ’em, may be, ’n say t I was 
green, sure enough ; an’ I ain’t a goin’ t’ give ’em a handle 
aginst — nobody. I would n’t hev him fust ! ” 

Which was a right wifely spirit beforehand, France thought ; 
and also perceived that the main question might be regarded as 
settled, without any responsibility of hers. 

“You mean, appear as bride!” she said, laughing. 

“Yes; walk pride,” said Sarell. “They’ve got it round t’ 
that. Everybody says walk pride. Don’t they in Boston ! ” 

“ I don’t think they do. It goes without saying, there, per- 
haps ; but not particulaidy the first Sunday of being married ; 
that is, conspicuously, among nice people.” 

“ Well, now you tell me jest what t’ do, like the nice people, 
’ll I ’ll do it. I ’ll be genteel, even if Fellaiden folks don’t know 
enough to know it. It ’ll be a satisfaction t’ my own mind.” 


THE DAM PASTURE. 


167 


“ Why don’t you wear brown 1 A deep, rich brown, with a 
sunny shade in it, to tone with your hair. It ’s very becoming. 
And then, if it ’s going to be cool weather, a brown hat and 
feather, or a brown velvet bonnet.” 

“ White gloves 1 ” 

“ Oh, no, indeed ! Brown, just like your dress.” 

“ My ! nothin! white 1 ” 

“Nothing but your ruffles, and your pocket-handkerchief; 
and that must be in your pocket, if you want to be very nice.” 

“ Sakes ! it ’s pocketin’ everything. Ain’t it kind o’ every- 
day 1 You can’t walk pride but once, y’ know.” 

“ I ’d do that in my pocket, or in my heart ; and I ’d do it 
every day of my life, if I once began,” said France. 

“ Y’ can put y’rself int’ my place, aft’r all,” said Sarell. 

But it was hardly into her place, as walking pride with Hollis 
Bassett. 

Yet, as France has otherwise compared it, every woman must 
take her own road. It may be a longer road for Sarell Gate- 
ly ; yet who knows 1 

“ ’T won’t be Tryphosy Clark that ’ll hev the buyin’ of it, 
nor yet the makin’,” said the bride-elect, as she rose and led 
the promised way, brookward. “She dressmakes, or sets up 
to ; an’ she goes t’ Reade, an’ doos shoppin’ arrants f’r folks. 
She went t’ Boston once ; an’ she took arrants f’r pretty much 
the whole town. Her own come out o’ the trimmins ; parlor 
carpet ’n all, I guess ; f’r she got one, an’ she got the church 
carpet with the sewin’ society money ; an’ if she was as good at 
lumpin’ business as she was at a sep’rit job, she must ’a p’utty 
near made it out. She bought me a fifty-cent grennerdeen ; 
fifteen yards ; an’ ther’ was n’t any change out o’ ten dollars. 
That ’s Tryphosy. That ’s her betweenity. She ’s exper’enced 
religion. But I would n’t want her to pick it out f’r me, any 
more ’n another grennerdeen ! ” 

Behind the pines, the slope of the knoll was hidden by the 
close, live laurel bushes, and by tangles of old stems of many 
that had been winter-killed, dry and brown, but showing such 
shooting lines of long, luxuriant growth, like water-lines of 
fountains, and crossing their fine upper branches in such deli- 


168 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


cate screenwork, that to France’s eyes they were part, and nc 
small part, of the exquisite finish of the place, and not at all 
dead blemish. Sarell parted the green masses and broke away, 
with reckless hands, the tall, brittle stalks 

“0, don’t!” cried France. She would as soon have demol- 
ished the carved fretwork of some beautiful chapel. “ You are 
making rubbish of it ; and it was lovely, just as it stood ! ” 

“Well, I declare! you do like brown things!” said Sarell. 
“ But here ’s the brook. Look here.” 

“ Peer out 1 ” asked France mischievously ; and over Sarell’s 
shoulder she literally peered. 

A low, steep bank, slippery with pine needles ; thick-growing 
shrubbery all along, on either hand, like that they had come 
through ; over opposite, an unbroken hedge-line of it, except 
where a narrow opening showed a cattle-track to the clear 
water; the bend of the brook, right and left, burying itself in 
the sweet green mystery again ; between, its musical, clear 
gurgle, and the cool shimmer and braid of scores of tiny falls 
and curls and eddies, with bubbling pools spreading wider here 
and there ; the bed of it lovely-wild and broken with stones, 
and green, stately brakes and tender ferns crowding exuberant 
along its edges. It was a little water-world, hidden away here, 
utterly ; they had not, — France had not, — known of it, sitting 
within a stone’s throw. 

“ Why, one thing opens from another here, like fairy-land,” 
she cried. “ I wonder if we have n’t got into a seven years’ 
dream, in an elf-wood ! I wonder if Heybrook Farm is any- 
where about here, or we shall ever get back to it ! ” As she 
spoke she dipped her hands in the stream and tossed the drops 
up till they caught the sunlight, and fell back, glittering. 
Then she drank from her curved palm, the stintless flow fresh- 
ening itself and bringing ever virgin waters, that she might 
wash, and drink, and wash again, at wayward pleasure. 

“ ‘ Telling, telling, telling, all the while ! Telling, telling, 
telling, as fast as I can ; and yet they never guess half my 
beautiful secrets. Babble, babble, babble, but nobody comes 
or listens. All to myself, all to myself, this, and a hundred 
other places ! ’ That ’s what it says, Sarell ; and it can hardly 


THE DAM PASTURE. 


169 


say plain for laughing. 0, the brook-songs are n’t all written 
yet ! but until there is another one,” — and then, for pure glee, 
she broke forth with the never w'orn-out ripple, — 

“ I chatter, chatter, as I flow 
To join the brimming river ; 

For men may come, and men may go, 

But I go on forever — ever, 

I go on forever ! ” 

Her clear voice *rang up above the accompaniment of the 
water, into the still air, through which it vibrated further than 
she knew. 

' “ There ’s one, now,” Sarell said suddenly, in a low, quick 
tone, coming to her side. 

“One whatl” asked France, half startled, yet with no actual 
idea of anything more than a bird or a fish. 

“ One man, of course,” said Sarell. “ Cornin’ an’ goin’, sure 
enough. He don’t act as though he meant to git anywheres. 
I saw him fust, five minutes ago, between the branches, stop- 
pin’ out there, at the turn. He was kinder lookin’ ; an’ then 
he stepped across the stones an’ went off, Thumble-woods way, 
I thought. Now, he’s back again.” 

“ Sarell ! Where 1 ” 

Sarell pointed to the right. “ Out there,” she said, “ right 
where we ’ve ben a berry in’. It ’s a wonder ’f he did n’t hear 
you sing. ’F he ’s stayin’ round, — what ’ll we do about it 1 
An’ there ’s all our berries out there, too ! It ’s a mercy I 
tucked ’em under the birches ! ” 

France turned a little pale. She was not used to meeting 
strange people in such broad solitudes. There was something 
fearful, suddenly, in the beautiful, secret place of the babbling 
brook ; and a dread lay in the sweet chamber of the pines 
through which they must return. “ You told me nobody ever 
came here,” she said, with a scared reproach. 

“ No, I did n’t ; for here we are ourselves,” said Sarell. “ An’ 
I s’pose he ’s got jest as good a right. Only, somehow, I felt ’s 
if we ’d spoke the place to-day. I ’ve ben alone here, fifty 
times.” 

“ If I had n’t sung that ridiculous song ! ” thought France 


170 ODD, OR EVEN ? 

But she determined not to give words or way to any precipitate 
panic. 

“ Was he a working-man — or a gentleman — or a tramp ? ” 
She began her questioning with a determined calmness ; but at 
the last unwilling syllable her whisper fainted to a breath across 
her lips, 

“ Why, I tell y’u, I could n’t see. He just looked — black.” 

Black?'' 

“ 1 don’t mean the man. His figger, — against the light, y’ 
know, an’ through the criss-cross of the branches. Lor ! the’ 
ain’t nothin’ t’ take on about. He warn’t anybody ; an’ he ’s 
off b’ this time, I dassay.” 

These remarkable and contradictory assumptions failed to re- 
assure Miss Everidge ; but she crept mechanically after her 
companion, who parted the laurels cautiously, and they re-en- 
tered the pine parlor. 

“ How shall we ever get away again 1 ” France besought. 

“ My gracious I ” answered Sarell, with a great and sudden 
emphasis, that shook off all possible connection with what she 
seemed to reply to. She made a spring forward, in which 
France checked her by a peremptory grasp. 

“ The river, the dam ! They ’ve shut the water-gate. They ’ve 
stopped the mill f’r somethin’ ! Now we air caught. F’r you 
can’t ever walk three miles, through Thumble woods ! ” 

Sarell was in earnest, now ; she had been half manufacturing 
a fright before. She rushed from France’s loosing hold, down 
the winding glade-way into the open. 

France stood an instant, the growing thunder of the water 
in her ears. Then, of inevitable necessity, she followed on. 

“ There ’s y’r brimmin’ river ! I should think so ! ” said 
Sarell, pointing to the swelling volume of the falling flood. 
“ They ain’t done that in five years, afore. An’ I beared the 
mill-whistle, too ; an’ never thought but ’twas the railroad. 
They let it off when we was on the upland there, beyond the 
oaks, — an’ hour ago ; my head had n’t nothin’ but huckle- 
ben-ies in it — an’ we ’ve ben foolin’ round, jest as contented ! 
Well, we may content ourselves now.” 

It was something grand to see, — the leap of the full stream 


THE DAM PASTURE. 


171 


to its old channel. Already it was rushing, in white foam, 
hither and thither, between the rocks, finding its old ways 
afresh. It was like the return of a strong, glad brotherhood to 
a birthplace ; searching out swiftly, with shouts, the places they 
knew and had been kept away from, and filling them with their 
rejoicing life again. 

The broad, down-spilling sheet was silvery in the sun, where 
the naked timber had lain across, and behind it the repressed 
flood had waited. The mill-pond — wide, but held between de- 
fined, ledgy banks, and with a back run of only that rod or two, 
— had risen quickly. It was full of water, and for half a mile 
back of the little fall the current was swift, pressed in between 
the foot of the Oak Ridges and the steep flank of Fellaiden Hill. 
Above that it broadened, and lay in a lovely, safe, interval 
reach ; its hidden bed, perhaps, being formed against a checking 
incline, where Fellaiden Hill dropped its east-lying buttress 
gently northward. 

A great, continuous avalanche of sound had burst upon, and 
possessed, the stillness of the remote, hushed woodland. 

The mill-people — all but those who were busied by what- 
ever necessity of change or repair had obliged the stop — had 
gone away already through the village. There was no one to 
whom to sign or call ; there was no way anywhere, but up 
through the long, dense forest that lay around the foot of 
Thumble, or over the steep spur-cliff that separated these wide- 
enclosed pastures from the other side of the mill-hollow and the 
highway beyond the bridge. 

The man, whom for a moment they had forgotten, was no- 
where to be seen. 

The two girls stood there, scarce thinking, when they did 
recollect, whether to be glad or sorry for this. 

There were other glades which ran in among the pine-trees ; 
through some one of these, the intruder, caught, doubtless, as 
they were, by the over-flow of the dam, had, after his recon- 
noissance which aroused Sarell’s questionings, apparently taken 
his final way toward and over the brook, and along some wood- 
path. 

“Shall we holler 1” asked Sarell, first to consider advisa- 
bilities. 


172 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


“ And bring that man back ? No, indeed ! ” exclaimed 
France. “ What good would that do 1 ” 

“We sh’ll want some help out o’ this — or you will. It’ll be 
p’utty late b’ time either o’ the boys '11 come along t’ the bar- 
place, ’n then c’n git back t’ the little crossin’, ’n down through 
the woods this side. They won’t think o’ cornin’ f’r us t’ll mos’ 
sundown. They ’re up ’n the turnpike lot, ’n I told ’em we 
wanted t’ have all day.” 

“ I don’t care. I ’ll wait. But what will they do then 1 ” 
France spoke purposely in that incorrect impersonal plural. 

“ 0, ’f ’t ’s they, they c’n do most anything. ’F ’t ’s only he, 
— well, he ’ll do something. A man alwers can. He ’s bound 
to, ’f he can’t. P’raps he ’ll fetch a hatchet, ’n git a log, or 
some birches, across somewheres. The’ ain’t but one real wide 
place under the dam. But we don’t want it t’ take all night, 
y’ see. Y’ better lemme sing out, ’fore it ’s too late.” 

But at that moment, a clear, strong shout rang up above the 
noise of the water. It came from somebody by the brookside, 
among the pine thickets. 

“ Hil — lo ! ” it sounded, first. And then followed, distinctly, 
the syllables, “ Miss Fr — ance ! ” 

France put up a little agate whistle that somebody had 
brought her from Chamouny, and that hung, as a charm, from 
her watch-chain. As she blew a shrill note, Sarell added, in 
almost as shrill a soprano, “ Here, we ’re here ! ” choosing, 
woman-fashion, the vowel of least possible sonorousness to shout 
on. And as she said hurriedly, “ It must be Flip Merriweather, 
come over the Instrup, an’ goin’ up pickerel fishing,” France, 
watching the line of pines, saw somebody break quickly through 
a cover of high laurels, and then Bernard Kingsworth, crashing 
the fern-bushes with long steps toward her. 

“ 0, I am so glad it ’s you ! ” she cried, and sprang to meet 
him. 

Beniard Kingsworth looked glad. No wonder, not knowing 
the reason of that emphasis. 

France, unconscious, shook her head restrainingly at Sarell 
behind his shoulders, as she walked back over the slope with 
him to where they had been standing. She would not have 
him know her girlish fright at him. 


THK DAM PASTURE. 173 

“ This is a strange adventure for us all,” she said, her quiet- 
ness and reserve coming back with reassurance. 

“ No. It ’s only a predicament,” said Sarell concisely. Her 
self-possession, if she had ever really lost it, had returned also. 
She stood idly stripping a tall bush beside her, her mouth al- 
ready full again of fruit. “ We may as well pick our blackber- 
ries now, though.” 

She began to gather oak-leaves and to spread them over the 
blueberries in the basket. 

“ Ther ’s room f’r two quarts there, an’ the two pails ’ll be 
two more, besides your basket, France. We could n’t kerry any 
more, anyway ; an’ we ’ll pile the rest up in the pine pantry, t’ 
be fetched to-morro’.” 

“ I should like to know how we ’re to be fetched ourselves, 
first,” said France. 

“ The ’s boats,” said Sarell ; “ an’ p’raps they ’ll start the 
mills agin, ’fore night. An’ there ’s the Instrup path.” She 
was full of potentials now. A man might and should, as well 
as could, do anything. It was his business and his lookout, as 
soon as he was there : she was there to pick berries. 


174 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


CHAPTER XVIII. 

THE POWER AND THE PARTS. 

“ I HAD just come over what Sarell calls the ‘ Instrup’ path,” 
said Mr. Kingsworth. “ I believe they call it so from ‘ Instep,’ 
the join of the foot-hill to the- ankle-curve, as it might be, of 
Thumble. I was coming up through the woods from the vil- 
lage ; I saw the water rising when I first came out into the 
open pasture above in view of it ; I walked down this way just 
to watch it, as it crept up to the brim, and went over; then I 
thought I heard a sound of voices in the wood, and turned back 
again toward the brook. I knew whoever might be here would 
have something of a tramp out again either way, and that they 
might have come and been hemmed in precisely as has hap- 
pened with you. Of course, I did not dream it could be you, 
until I heard you sing.” 

“ But you never heard me sing before,” France answered with 
surprise. 

“No, I never did,” said Bernard Kingsworth. He did not 
ask her why, since in the hymns at church so many voices joined 
unhesitatingly; neither did he say, or quite account for it to 
himself, that the tones of her voice, that should have been 
strange to him, had yet not been, even for a single second, 
strange at all. 

“ It is very well you are not in haste,” he went on, glancing 
at Sarell, who was pushing her path through high tangles a lit- 
tle apart from them, — picking her way, in the literal sense of 
blazing a line through the fruit-laden vines by stripping them 
of their juicy burden as she went. “You will have to w'ait 
here some time, in any case. Could you walk half a mile, or a 
little more, with safety, do you think. Miss France 1 ” 

France was confident in the affirmative. 


THE POWER AND THE PARTS. 175 

“ It will be rough, but — with assistance — I am glad I hap- 
pened to come this way to-day.” 

Something in the slight hesitation, the choice of an imper- 
sonal phrase, instead of a direct offer or assurance of his own 
help, and in the tone in which the word “ glad ” escaped him, 
might have carried sign to speaker, if not to hearer, of that 
which was coming to be what the Scotch call “ by-ordinar ” in 
the interest of their association. 

Whetlier it did or not, France asked quietly, without repeat- 
ing what she had already said impetuously in the first relief of 
meeting him, “Is there any choice of resource for usl You 
said ‘ in any case.’ ” 

And Bernard replied as instantly, “Yes; I was going on to 
say there are several things to be thought of.” He took out his 
watch. “ It is now after half past two o’clock. At any time 
after five, I suppose, they may come for you. They were to 
come for you, of course 1 ” 

“Yes,” France said, “to the barplace over the dam, Lymau 
drove us down there this morning.” 

Mr. Kingsworth nodded. He knew the \vays of the place, 
and had easily divined the whole situation. “ Then they will 
have left home before you can reach there. I think the first 
thing must be to notify them.” 

France exclaimed, “ If we could do that, we could get there ?” 
Her exclamation ended interrogatively. 

“ Not of necessity. To get you there, I must send to them, 
or do what will occupy as much time. One of the Heybrooks 
could come down with a boat from the little crossing. Israel 
used to have one there, I think ; or, Philip Merriweather keeps 
a skiff somewhere about on the river, and I could find it or him, 
perhaps. If I go over the ‘ Instrup ’ I shall accomplish both, 
possibly; in which case the whole party, fruit-cargo and all, 
may be conveyed by water. But you will have to walk the half 
mile to safe navigation.” 

He had not said that if one only of the little boats could be 
procured his own course would be on foot, after all those hours, 
with his extra climb to be added, in the deepening evening, the 
whole long way to North Fellaiden. 


176 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


“ I can walk quite well ; I shall like it,” said France. “But 
must you go away 1 ” There was some reluctant remonstrance 
in her inquiry. He could not know, since it had been of her 
own free pleasure to come here for all day, that she felt any 
newly roused timidity at remaining without protection. 

“ I would rather stay, of course,” he answered, smiling. “ But 
that would not achieve anything. I had better address myself 
at once to the ‘ Instrup.’ I shall dispatch a messenger from the 
village, and then look for Phil at the doctor’s.” 

“Flip’s jest as likely t’ turn up here,” put in Sarell, whose 
moth-path of picking had come round beside them. “He’s 
alwers off on some tramp. He ’ll either be cornin’ over the ‘ In- 
strup ’ himself, to go up t’ the crick f’r pick’rel, or he ’ll be goin’ 
back agin, ’f he ’s been a’ready. ’Less he ’s way up Thumble agin, 
an’ then ther ’ll be no use, anyway.” 

“Except in sending for Eael,” said the minister, “which is 
my clear duty at present ; in doing which, the other may hap- 
pen also, as I have been explaining to Miss Everidge. If Phil 
appears this way from anywhere, you must intercept and keep 
him.” 

“ I ain’t ’gzac’ly frettin’ after Flip Merriweather, to incept nor 
to keep him, neither one,” said Miss Gately, with a spice of scorn, 
and some confusion of Latin compounds of the verb “ to take.” 
But she did not say it to the minister ; he had lifted his hat, 
and disappeared in the bushy pathway that would take him 
toward the Instrup. 

Mr. Kingsworth was gone more than an hour. It was a good 
half hour’s work to cross the Instrup path. 

France had lost the enthusiasm of berrying; besides which, 
she felt the wisdom, as Sarell suggested, of “ savin’ up her 
strength t’ git home with.” She tried to read a little, while 
Sarell picked on alone ; then she put by the book, and tried her 
wool-work. Sketching she had no mind for ; she could not fix 
herself to the study of any scrap of her great surroundings, 
while the whole, from the towering height of craggy, pine- 
scrawled Thumble to the wide plunge of the river, and its ra- 
vine of rocks and foam below, drew and widened her gai?e, and 
strained it with the sense of thronging grandeur and beauty. 


THE POWEK AND THE PARTS. 177 

Before long she had rolled up her canvas and wools again, and 
folded her hands to watch and wait. 

No Phil appeared. But something else appeared, climbing 
over Thumble, — a surge of beautiful cloud ; white, at first, in 
the strong sunlight ; then, as light drifts of vapor floated and 
gathered, westerly, and lay between it and the descending sun, 
it turned gray and heavy ; and other piles reared up, above the 
black hills, north and eastward, slowly climbing, driven from 
the south, up the valleys on the further side. 

“ That ’s a thunder-head,” observed Sarell, tipping her hat 
back to look up. “’F it spills over the crown this side, we 
sh’ll hev it. But it may go up north.” 

For the last half hour of Mr. Kingsworth’s absence, France 
sat watching the thunder-head. 

Bernard Kingsworth watched it also, as he hurried back over 
the Instrup. He was beginning to be anxious ; for neither had 
he found Phil Merriweather. They had only to wait for Rael 
Heybrook, — making their own way through the heavy woods, 
meanwhile, to where he could take them up ; and this threaten- 
ing tempest rearing its menace at them from beyond the 
mountain. 

“ But there is always a way out,” he said to himself ; and 
repeated it to France Everidge, when she came a second time, 
eagerly, and with apprehensive words, to meet him. 

“ Here, Miss Sarell,” he called cheerily, as they turned to- 
gether to where that young woman stood intrenched. “ I ’ve 
brought a basket for your extra berries.” 

“ Well, there, now ! ” she ejaculated ; “ ef you ain’t a master 
one f ’r thinkin’ ’v ev’rything ! I thought of it, ’s soon ’s you 
was gone.” 

“And sent the thought after me, probably. Thoughts do 
travel, — and accomplish their errands, — if we did but know, 
and could believe.” 

“That black cloud travels,” said France, looking upward, 
“and drops ; it is drawn over the ridge now, like a cap.” 

“ Then we ’ve got it, sure enough,” said Sarell. 

“We are between the river and the storm,” said France. 
And the storm answered her with a far-off growl of thunder. 

12 


178 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


The girl shuddered, quite inwardly and to herself, she 
thought ; for she would not senselessly shiver or bemoan ; but 
Bernard Kingsworth perceived it. 

“ There ’s always a way out,” he said again, with that bright 
smile of his. 

It lifted her dread just enough, with its persistent hearten- 
ing, to set her thought free for a question. 

“ I don’t see how you can say that,” she said. “ People do 
not always have a way out, and why should we 1 There was 
no way out at Ashtabula or at Revere.” 

“ Are you sure 1 ” 

She understood the significance. “ Only by the chariots of 
fire. We do not want to go that way.” 

“No. We are not meant to want to. But when the chariots 
come for us, — we shall see that they are chariots ! ” 

I have not said, perhaps, that Bernard Kingsworth was a 
plain man. You would not have thought of it, except when 
the brightness of his nature — the sudden shining of some 
great thought or feeling of it — transfigured him; and then 
you would have wondered where your vision was, that you had 
not seen the open glory in his face before. 

He stood now with his hat off; his walk over that steep 
path had been a warm and hurried one ; the quick wind that 
began to flow over the top of Thumble, like the water over the 
dam, as that urging current which brings a summer storm, 
rushed up along its great southward precipice, swept the 
brown waves of his hair from the broad serenity of his brow ; 
and his eyes, lifted to the hills, whence the fear might come 
for others, looked almost visibly into the Face of his Strength. 

France had a strange, thrilled feeling, that might be like 
what they felt who stood around when “Jesus lifted up 
his eyes to heaven,” and straightway, out of his own abiding- 
place, came down the bread-blessing, so that their souls were 
fed — the healing, so that their bodies were made whole — the 
peace,* that overwhelmed their fear — the life, that quickened 
them in the very graves, and called them forth. Something 
more than the gift of the moment — that by which the gift was 
made possible — came to them, with the Christ and his open 


THE POWER AND THE PARTS. 


179 


heaven by their side. Something of that comes by human con- 
tact when any human soul stands — in the blessed order — ■ 
between another and the great Light. The spirit makes, then, 
not a shadow, but a translucence, which is the shadow of the 
land that hath no need of the sun. 

Something of this shadow fell, like the “ shadow of the wings,” 
upon Frances Everidge. It was good for her to be there. She 
was not afraid of the storm any longer. 

Her own face calmed and lit up, and repeated into his what 
it had caught from it. They two met upon a plane, at that 
moment, where there is nothing to hinder. 

This man had a great gift for her. She recognized that. In 
that upper region of her life, she hailed him joyfully. There 
were many things she would fain have asked of him. Her heart 
warmed, standing by his side. But it was the heart of the 
angel, that was to grow in her, not the heart of the woman, 
who was not an angel yet, and who would choose as a woman 
chooses, by some divine instinct, yet an instinct moving upon 
the earthside of her, albeit from out the heavenly. There 
are “ discrete degrees ” in all things. We love, as we think, 
in different altitudes. I do not distinguish now as between 
high love and baser passion. I speak of pure, true things. 
There is a love which would not dare, or wish, to appropriate. 
Women have loved men so, with something of that pure enthu- 
siasm with which the Maries loved the Lord. Would he have 
walked with women so, and given so much of his gospel through 
the hearts of women, if that love had not been possible 1 How 
it may be with mere common men, I do not know. Perhaps 
the danger is that the altitude may be a transient one, on both 
sides. 

With Frances Everidge, as we have had some glimpse before, 
there was an absolute, strange impatience of the lower level — 
the intimacy of every day — with Bernard Kingsworth. It 
came largely, thus far, from a subtile, resistent jealousy of 
that which, to ordinary apprehensions, gave him the better 
chance with her. Because they were the only young man and 
young woman in Fellaiden of the same outward type and stand- 
ing, because in this way, in spite of themselves, they con- 


180 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


trasted obviously, perhaps, with these other fine, bright, capable, 
honorable, innately-delicate, all except world-polished and 
world-alloyed, young persons, — she would not, even in com- 
monest ways, be paired off with him. 

France would put her thought in the plural, when she mul- 
tiplied her adjectives in her mental judgments and indignant 
comparisons ; but it was scarcely that she thought of Sarell or 
of Flip Merriweather, or even of Lyman Heybrook, mere un- 
formed boy that he was. It was of the man in the black coat, 
and the man in the white shirt-sleeves, with his milk-pails, 
whom she had set over against each other that first afternoon 
which had brought the three of them together before the sub- 
lime measures of that “ altar in the midst of the land of Egypt," 
and whom she balanced against each other still, with a resent- 
ment against the absent world — her world — because she 
knew it would gauge the tw^o so differently. She held herself 
back from the personal attraction of Bernard Kingsworth, lest 
she herself should be letting the world-measures sway her. 
She was so determined to despise them, that she almost meas- 
ured Bernard Kingsworth’s broadcloth and his education against 
him. 

And all the while, that other inconsistent resentment had 
been working in her, against herself, because of something half- 
conscious that she would not wholly look at, not being yet able 
to look at it with the braving of the world within herself that 
she had arrogated. 

How it would have been with all this if she had not begun 
here, with the persuasion that the nobly-anomalous young 
farmer-gentleman thought her “too fine to be fit to compre- 
hend,” — how it would have been if she had known Bernard 
Kingsworth before she had comprehended Rael Heybrook, — 
how it might yet be, if this summer episode were passed, and 
other days were come, with other growth in her, and other 
shaping circumstance, — does not belong to this paragraph or 
chapter, or even to the whole story, the story itself being but 
a paragraph, after all, as all our human stories are ; full of 
temporary contradiction and half solution ; comprehensible al- 
together only to the one Author and Reader. While this is 


THE POWER AND THE PARTS. 181 

80 , we shall go on criticising, from these same half views, each 
other’s stories and our own lives. 

When Mr. Kingsworth turned to France again, how could he 
help seeing the light in her face ? and how could he know how 
his own had shone 1 It began to be a lovely hour to him. 
For this hour, he alone could care for her. The rest of the 
world was put off by a wide circumference. They were 
hemmed in here, with just enough of an anxiety to draw them 
close ; an anxiety that it was his task to reassure her in, and to 
turn aside. 

But you will mistake — and I shall, if I leave you time to 
mistake in — if you suppose that there was any mooniiiess in 
Bernard Kingsworth that would waste a minute with the senti- 
ment that made his task a thing to be thankful for that it was 
his, which was needful for the action that the opportunity 
imposed ; or that his belief was of any sort that would let him 
stand believing, while the deed of faith waited. 

What waited now — or what were not left to wait — were 
the merest measures of practical good sense. He looked care- 
fully at the weather-signs ; he noted for a minute or two longer 
the drift and climb of those cloud-masses ; then he said, “ It 
will be here in a few moments, whatever we are to have of it. 
But I think it will be only the fringe of the storm. We are 
better here than we should be in the low woods. Miss Sarell, 
we shall want those shawls ; and you had better make haste 
with your berries.” 

Sarell, determined upon filling her fifth measure of blackber- 
ries, was picking till the last minute. She left the plan of 
campaign and the word of command to others. Now she 
turned, with surprise. “ Shawls 1 ” she said ; “ we ain’t got any. 
There ’s France’s waterproof, that ’s all.” But Mr. Kingsworth 
came to her, uncovered the basket he had brought, and drew 
forth two woollen shawls, which he had borrowed in the village. 

“ Well, if you don’t beat the Dutch ! Is the’ anything inside 
the shaiols ? ” 

Mr. Kingsworth laughed, and answered by piitting France 
inside one of them, then laid the other upon Sarell’s disregard- 
ing shoulders. That young woman was stooping, finishing 


182 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


thoroughly the thing she came for, whatever the winds and 
the clouds might have come for since. She emptied her heaped 
pail, and dexterously turned the contents of its mate, to which 
she had improvised a tall continuation of birch-bark cylinder, 
into the additional receptacle ; tied a “ tin kittle ” to the bail 
of each basket, bestowing thei’ein the smaller articles that had 
been auxiliary to their lunch; then, just as a wild whirl of 
wind brought with it some great, smiting drops of rain, she 
thrust them under some juniper-bushes in a cradle-hollow, 
gathei'ed the shawl more firmly about her, and hurried after 
France and the minister. 

Mr. Kingsworth led them into a deep little covert, discerned 
and resolved on by himself within three minutes, between an 
overshelving rock, that made a partial roof for them upon its 
leeward side, and a thick, hedgy group of scrubby pasture 
cedars. Against the rock itself grew birches, strong and lithe ; 
from these to the cedars, underneath the shelter of the 
branches, Mr. Kingsworth was stretching and fastening, one 
way and another — with its own buttons and buttonholes, 
some pins of twigs and a bit of cord — France’s large water- 
proof. Under this little tent they all gathered, seating them- 
selves upon dry knolls of turf and moss ; and instantly the storm 
broke. 

First, wind ; that came raging over the foot-hill, bending the 
trees, and whitening its path across the upland with turning 
the pale undersides of grass and fern and little birch-shrubs, as 
it smote them level ; tearing a great fringe of cloud from the 
flank of Thumble, to pour it down in shot-like rain, with wide 
spaces between the drops. Then a fierce descent of driven 
waters, in tense, slanting lines, rushing, unbroken from the 
discharging heavens, to bury themselves like lances in the 
earth. Then a quick, arrowy flash, and a simultaneous peal of 
thunder. 

France involuntarily laid her hand upon Mr. Kingsworth’s 
arm. “ Oh ! is it safe here ? ” she whispered, as if the lightning, 
like a robber, might hear, and break in upon them. 

“ It is whei’e we are put,” answered Mr. Kingsworth, with 
the cheer of a child of the Father in his voice. And again the 


THE POWER AND THE PARTS. 183 

sense of childlikeness and rest came over her, because he 
had it. 

She withdrew her hand, and folded it, with the other, in her 
lap. If he had looked at her, he would have seen, even in the 
dimness, that her face flushed. But he did not look or move, 
or notice that movement of hers. A different man might have 
taken the hand, with some soothing word ; but he knew it was 
not laid there for him to take. His face was from her, and he 
did not turn. I think the very thrill of the touch kept him 
motionless. Bernard Kingsworth, in all his grown-up man- 
hood, had not known the close companionship or sweet, 
dependent intimacy of mother, sister, or — was this woman 
ever to be that? — dear woman friend. The brief clinging of 
the fingers, where a woman’s fingers had never clung before, 
sent the unframed asking, with the instant respecting sense of 
its mere involuntariness, through heart and brain. 

“ And I think this is the best place,” he went on, as if there 
had been no pause, as indeed there scarcely had been, except in 
that realm that is without time, — where the pauses are of 
inward event. “ Among the tall pines, or under any of these 
groups of scattered oaks, it would hardly have been wise to 
take shelter. But here, — see how we are nestled in among the 
bits of birch and the ferns, and all the little lowly things that 
are too lowly to be hurt. See how the wind and the rain drive 
off from us, following the slant of the rock. Your cloak will be 
hardly wet. The storm itself roofs us over. I feel very safely 
put by. Miss France ! ” 

“You make me feel very sure of ^our safety,” France 
answered, smiling, as he now turned to her. “ And — ours — 
is inseparable from it, I hope ! ” She had come near forgetting 
Sarell, and saying “mine.” It was not altogether the self- 
rebuking of self that checked her. 

The wind and rain slackened ; the burst of the shower was 
over; a little bird gave a solitary note. “ It will soon be past; 
it is only the skirt of the cloud, as I told you,” said Mr. Kings- 
worth. 

Sarell sat near the tent-opening, where the corner of the 
waterproof hung down from a cedar bush a little way from the 


184 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


rock, the shrubs shutting them in thickly on all the other sides 
of their hiding-place. At this moment she startled them sud- 
denly. 

“Se-e he -ere !” she shouted; again in that ridiculous femi- 
nine way, high-pitching her voice, and straining it on the 
miserable closed vowel. “ Phil — In - up ! ” 

That did better ; there came back a man’s “ Hallo ! ” and 
Phil Merriweather, on his way down the hill, turned, and pre- 
sented himself before the opening, through which Sai'ell’s head 
and shoulders were thrust out into the rain. 

“ Fill up ! ” he repeated. “ I should say things were filling up, 
pretty well ! How came you here % ” The last four wmrds were 
overwhelmed by five from Sarell uttered at the same moment. 

“ Where did you drop from 1 ” She demanded it as if she had 
hailed him from pure curiosity. 

“ Is that all you want to know 1 Down Thumble, — with the 
rest of the family.” 

^^FanilyV' 

“Yes; the Merry-weathers. Don’t I look like it!” From 
the sloping thatch of his wide straw hat, which he and the 
wind were still clutching at together, to the rolled-up hems of 
his trousers, he stood there dripping, like a kelpie. “ Now it ’s 
my turn. What are you here for % ” 

“ T’ fill up berry-baskets. An’ it ’s done. Now, we want t’ 
git home agin.” 

“TTe? Who else?” 

“France Everidge and the minister.” 

“ Thunder ! ” said Flip Merriweather. 

“No, Mr. Kingsworth, — you keep dry. I’ll do the talkin’,” 
Sarell parenthesized easily, over her shoulder. “ I ain’t said 
much before, when ’t warn’t no use. Thunder ? ” she went on, 
her face to Flip and the outer world again, and ignoring the 
restraint of any listening behind her. “Yes; an’ the rain 
cornin’ down like choppin’-knives, fit t’ make surrup ’v all them 
blackb’ries, beforehand ; an’ a mile ’r tiew ’v woods — accordin’ 
— gitt’n wet ’n slipp’ry for the way out ; an’ all that load t’ 
kerry ; an’ th’ aft’noon a goin’; an’ we sitt’n here under the 
bushes, caught in this dam scrape ! ” 


THE POWER AND THE PARTS. 185 

Flip whooped in ecstasy at the climax of her rehearsal, given 
in her usual cheerful flow and tone. 

“Well, I say !” he shouted. “You ‘do the talkin’’ tall, for 
the minister ! ” And the minister and France laughed, irresisti- 
bly, behind her. 

Sarell — nbi conscia recti — kept both tone and countenance. 
“ Now you ’re caught too, though, it ’s all right,” she concluded, 
with careless equanimity. 

“ Oh, thank you ! Well, what do you propose % ” Flip took 
off his straw hat as he spoke, and flapped the rain from it, shook 
himself generally, and reduced himself from the pouring to the 
simply drenched condition. Mr. Kingsworth had come forth 
now, notwithstanding Sarell’s remonstrance, and was shaking 
hands with him. 

France came and looked over Sarell’s shoulder from the 
opening. The scattered lines of raindrops were glittering 
already as they fell, in the forth-stealing sunshine. They 
seemed to gather themselves up, shrinking cloudward, as they 
ceased. “0, how pretty it is!” France exclaimed. “And how 
strange and quick it all was ! ” 

But Miss Gately never dropped the thread of conversation, 
now that she had taken it up. “ We propose boats,” she 
answered Phil. “Yourn, f’r one, now you’ve come. Where 
is it?” 

“ Up the creek.” 

“ Land ! ” 

“No. It’s water. Creeks are, generally. I came down to 
skip over here,” he explained to Mr. Kingsworth, “ to save the 
Instrup. And there was the dam ! I mean it was n’t. It is 
going to stop raining. They ’ve got it hard up Sudley way, 
though, — hail. A black cloud went over there like a land-slide. 
Now, I ’ll tell you. I can ’t be any wetter. The sun ’s coming 
out, and half an hour of shine ’ll make your way all comfortable. 
It has n’t soaked much into the deep woods, this side. I ’ll take 
your berries and go along. I ’ll have my boat down to the 
mouth of the creek in less than an hour, and I ’ll wait there till 
you come. Where ’s your baskets 1 ” 

“ I ’ll git ’em,” said Sarell, pushing forward ; but the two men 


186 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


Stopped her. “ They’re back there, under some junipers, in 
a holler.” 

“I see,” said Flip. “When a woman tramps through the 
bushes she leaves trail enough. You keep still.” 

Flip was in his element. He was the man of the occasion. 
He came back with a big basket in either hand, as Mr. Kings- 
worth unfastened the waterproof, and drew it carefully away 
from over France’s head. She was so warm, she said, she 
wanted a breath of that delicious, rain-washed air. 

“You said ‘boats,’” said Flip. “We shall want more than 
my little canoe, if we ’re all to go. Where ’s Rael’s ? You can 
row, Mr. Kingsworth, if we can get that.” 

“ I have sent word up to the farm. Somebody will come 
down,” said Mr. Kingsworth. 

“He’s ben over the Instrup,” volunteered Sarell, seeing 
Flip’s stare. “ Y’ou ain’t the only one.” 

“ Nobody is,” said Mr. Kingsworth. 

“ There, now ; there ’s the betweenities, agin ! ” said Sarell. 
“ You go. Flip; your piece is between here an’ the crick.” 

“ I call that a clear prov’dunce, now ; an’ I ’m free t’ confess 
it,” she said, as Flip went off. 

Mr. Kingsworth was spreading the waterproof on the dry side 
of another group of rocks, in the fresh, open air. “ In contra- 
distinction to what 1 ” he asked, hearing Sarell’s words. 

“ Things in gener’l. You don’t think everything ’s a prov’- 
dunce, do you, Mr. Kingsworth 1 ” 

“Everything, if anything. Miss France, here is a safe seat. 
You will be tired standing, and the grass is wet. We must 
give the sun a half hour, Philip said. Miss Sarell, where does 
your providence begin and end 1 ” 

France had taken the place he had made for her, and called 
Sarell to another, which the ample cloak also covered. Mr. 
Kingsworth stood leaning on the tall ash stick which had served 
him for a climbing-staff. He looked straight into Sarell’s face, 
expecting an answer. 

The girl, put to her definitive, considered an instant, and 
then said, “ I suppose where the’ ain’t anything else.” 

“ I think so, too. Therefore, everywhere, and in all things, 
and enduring for ever. Otherwise, what is ‘providing’!” 


THE POWER AND THE PARTS. 187 

“ Look here, Mr. Kingsworth. You asked me, an’ so I ’ll say. 
I think things is p’ovided, gener’lly ; an’ folks is p’ovided, par- 
tially, with common sense; an’ then they two, or the sum 
totle of ’m, is set t’ work, an’ a spesh’l prov’dunce don’t set in, 
t’ll they ’re used up. I don’t think Prov’dunce troubles itself 
with ev’ry little puttickl’r thing. But then, I ain’t regen’rit ; 
nor no ain’t France,” she added, intrenching herself against 
possible individual ministration. 

Mr. Kingsworth smiled. “Did you pick all those berries 
‘ generally,’ or every particular one ? ” he asked her. 

“Well, I d’know. A good many tumbled in together, off 
one branch, when I shuck it, sometimes. An’ I suppose that ’s 
how they grew. Ef th’ Lord said, ‘ Let the’ be huckleberry- 
bushes,’ then the’ was huckleberry-bushes, wasn’t ther? An’ 
he don’t stop, after that, creatin’ ’em all sep’rit, does he 1 ” 

A look in France’s face, as she listened, with something too 
interiorly interested for a smile, did not escape Mr. Kingsworth. 
He answered ‘Sarell. 

“ I have seen you knit,” he said ; “ and I don’t think you 
paid regard, apparently, to stitches. The needlefuls ran off 
as if you hardly even thought of them ; and the work, as a 
whole, grew. But I suppose you will not say that there was no 
touch or movement of your fingers for each separate stitch 1 or, 
so, the whole would never be there.” 

“ Of course. But I sh’d be all wore out ’f I had t’ pick up, 
’n put over, ’n pick through, an’ reHize it, ev’ry single one, ’s I 
did when I fust learnt. I should n’t ever knit a stockin’, let 
alone a two-an’-a-ha^af-yard quilt.” 

“ Yes ; we are small, and easily overcome by the multitude 
of small things. But ‘ the Lord of the whole earth famteth 
not, neither is weary.’ That is our greatest way of thinking of 
Him. His power goes into the least making, the least holding 
up. And his knowledge and joy go also. He means it all, as 
we cannot endure to mean it. His Spirit ‘ goes with the word, 
and with it is the word made perfect.’ ” 

“ Prob’ly I sh’ll see it all when I ’m c’nverted,” said Sarell. 

“ Or perhaps, as you begin to see something of it, you will be 
converted. ‘Are being converted,' would be saying it more 


188 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


rightly ; for we all see something ; and they who see most need 
turning more and more toward the light. It takes a great deal 
to bring us face to face.” 

“ I like folks that ’ll ’low folks t’ see somethin’, ’thout stoppin’ 
’em t’ make ’em show their ticket,” said Sarell. “ An’ I don’t 
want to conterdick, neither. But the way I see now is that 
things is p’utty much done in the lump. ’S I make bread, 
now. Why, when I was very little, I uset t’ think ’t my 
mother made a loaf o’ bread the way the ants make an ant-hill, 
pilin’ it up, one speck at a time. An’ th’t one piled it light, ’n 
another piled it soggy ; ’n I could n’t see how they made it 
hold, anyway, or got time. But now, I jest take ha’af a peck 
o’ flour, an’ I mix it, an’ I work it, an’ set it t’ rise, ’n I bake it ; 
an’ the specks take care of themselves, an’ there ’t is, ’cordin’ 
t’ the natur’ of it. All I handled was the lump. An’ the w^orld 
looks jes’ so, once the natur’ of it’s made; an’ I can’t see it no 
other ways.” 

“ All you handled was the lump,” repeated Mr. 'Kingsworth. 
“ Something handled the particles ; something handled their 
relation to each other; something handled the fire, and the 
heat of it. Something took care of all that you brought, 
rudely, together. Some might was alive in what you call the 
nature of it, and worked, meekly, obediently, alongside, under- 
neath, beyond, your working. ‘Except the Lord build the 
house, they labor in vain that build it.’ The great power takes 
the infinitesimal part. That is the greatness, the infinity.” 

“ Men do not reckon that way,” said France after a pause. 
“ A man who transacts a great business does not hamper him- 
self with the details, and he is looked upon as great just in 
proportion as he can scheme and organize grandly, and delegate 
the particulars ; carrying the whole plan and purpose only in 
his own mind.” 

“ Precisely ; because, as I said, in our littleness, forced to 
give up details, we invert the truth, and come to think of the 
outline as greater than the filling up ; of our thought of things 
as actually holding them. The merchant or the general would 
be the greater who did not have to depute. But we were 
speaking, at first, of Proyidence ; of intent and I'uling in the 


THE POWER AND THE PARTS. 189 

things that happen. Don’t you see, Miss France, that the real 
inclusion of the less in the greater is the including of what we 
call results or exceptional occurrences in the infinite and eter- 
nal working of the numberless continual causes and sequences 
that we can never trace 1 Don’t you see. Miss Sarell,” turning 
to her with a definite illustration, as it occurred to him that 
he was lapsing into a phraseology and abstraction that might 
be all quite ovei'head to his simpler auditor, “ that it is a more 
wonderful thing that God should have taken care, with all the 
complications of all things else, from the very beginning of 
things, from the making and succession of all winds and rains, 
and in all the human lives and happenings till this very mo- 
ment, that help and sparing should come to us in this very 
little need of ours, than it would have been if He had inter- 
fered with an afterthought instead of a forethought, and turned 
things and people oui of what we call their natural course ? 
Isn’t it a greater providing that He should have made it in 
the order of things that the rain should stop, and that Philip 
should come this way rather than the other ; but should have 
so ordered that order, that it should play exactly right for us, 
without working disorder for anything else 1 ” 

“ What if it had not happened right, as we call it, for us 1 ” 
said France. 

“ Then it would have been right, as we should have seen it 
presently,” said Mr. Kingsworth. “ The happenings are never 
ended with what we call either right or wrong.” 

“But there is natural law,” said France, “that we can 
break, or run against, and that Providence won’t break, or turn 
aside from. And then, there is that question about asking ; 
that can make no difference, they say, because of law. They 
are always telling us about those things, now.” 

“ They stop short in the telling,” said Mr. Kingsworth, “ they 
leave out — just the providence. That the breakings and’ the 
repentings and the askings are all foreseen and provided for. 

Before they call I will answer.’ The answer has been laid up 
from that first ‘ ever.’ ” 

France glanced inquiringly. 

“ ‘ The kingdom and the power, for ever and ever.’ Away 


190 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


back in what we call done with and we cannot alter, but in 
what the Lord has never taken his hand from. ‘ Yesterday, to- 
day, and forever ’ ; that is the word and the Christ. We ask 
back into the Past when we ask help and forgiveness. And He 
is there, the Same.” 

“ Does what we do, then, not matter 1 ” 

“ ‘ Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound 1 God 
forbid ! ’ It matters everything. The grace may have to abound 
‘ to the uttermost,’ through consequence that we call retributiop, 
to time of which we say ‘ forever.’ ” 

“And yet, anywhere, it can be turned for the asking! That 
seems like reversing, — interfering. They tell us we can be 
really saved from nothing ; that to stop a drop of water out of 
its natural course would be to bring on a convulsion of worlds.” 

“Only what they call ‘natural course’ is but the little 
piece of one straight line that they can see. God works at the 
whole diagram. Miss France, you taught me ‘ patience ’ the 
other day. Under certain rules we worked out the result we 
wanted. If there had been no rules, where would have been 
the beauty, the power, the interest! God makes to himself 
rules, and in these he does all things.” 

“ But the rules do hinder ‘ patience ’ from coming out at all, 
sometimes.” 

“ Because we can neither invent perfect rules nor play all the 
possibilities perfectly. God can. His Patience is an Infinite 
Game.” 

“ A game ? ” 

“That seems to you a light word! I used it with its fullest 
intent. ‘ Game,’ traced back, is ‘gaman,’ — joy ; traced further 
back, is ‘ kam,’ — to love,” said Mr. Kingsworth. 

“ In a game,” said Sarell, who listened with her own rough 
common sense, caught what she could, and applied according to 
the previous preparation of her own mind, “ something beats an’ 
something gits beat, alwers. Now I ’d jest ike to ask you, Mr. 
Kingsworth, ’cause I ain’t religious, what some of us is jest put 
here t’ git beat for ! The game — you said we might say so — 
would n’t be anything athout two sides to it. Ain’t it p’utty 
clever in us, after all, t’ keep up the sinner side so ’s ’t the saints 
may hev it out, an’ hev the best of it ! ’ 


THE POWER AND THE PARTS. 


191 


“ If the game could possibly be against any human souls, and 
the prize of the calling could possibly be an exulting of escape 
and contrast,” said the minister ; “ but the Everlasting Provi- 
dence is the grand and perfect ordering of all souls, and for 
them, — just where they will be. We may be in the line of the 
conquering harmony, or we may be in that which opposes a seem- 
ing hindrance or disorder. We must be in the one or the other, 
for we all work in line, each in his place, upward or downward. 
We are all kings and priests in the lineage of our power and in 
the order of our consecration. We all, for good or for evil, do 
both ‘ pray ’ and ‘ preach ’ ; ‘ make known,' that is, both ways ; 
as we declare our want, and give on, declaring ourselves again 
as we have received. We are between powers and powers by 
every act. And our doing comes back to us, in the fulfilment 
of other doing, from above or from below us. We may move 
angels ; we may move devils ; and we move ourselves, by the 
same force, toward our joining with either. That is the awful- 
ness and the blessedness of living.” 

“ Did you mean all that by your ‘ betweenness,’ France 1 ” 

“ You have given us a beautiful sermon, Mr. Kingsworth,” 
said France, passing by Sarell’s question. 

“ Have 1 1 I did not mean it as a discourse. But if it has 
been a sermon in the sense of a true joining of a truth to an 
apprehension, I am glad that we have apprehended together. 
Will you tell me what Miss Sarell means by your word, — the 
‘ betweenness ’ 1 ” 

“ It was not my word exactly. It was Miss Aramah’s once ; 
she said everybody was between somebody and somebody else ; 
just what you have been saying, only we were talking of busi- 
nesses, — callings, — in the world ; that it was not high or low, 
but that every real business or doing was between. But it 
seems to me that there are two ways of it, — being between for 
what you can do for right and left, and being so for what you 
can get from right and left. There are some betweens that 
have no business to be.” 

“Thank you. Miss France. You have given me a beautiful 
text, now, for a sermon. Perhaps I shall try to preach it, day 
after to-morrow. But to-night, — the snn is doing his shining 
low now, and we must get you home.” 


192 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


I wonder if Bernard Kingsworth did not see that he was 
establishing a relation with this girl — she being just what she 
was, a good deal short of an angel and yet not a rushing fool — 
that might, that almost must, in the every-day working of every- 
day life, preoccupy against that other which ordinarily develops 
and subsists upon a certain level that daily life may maintain ? 
That he was setting himself forth w'here she would look upward 
to him at her highest gaze ; not dream of being able to walk 
hand in hand with him ; not desiring, or in an attitude to de- 
sire, what from him would almost seem like a profaning of the 
heavenly with the earthly. 

Or, not setting forth himself at all, but the truth, would he 
have gone on just the same, though he had known that for the 
truth’s sake he was putting from him the fair possibility of 
earthly joy and earthly marriage 1 

It is hard to receive the saying, save for them to whom it is 
given. 


A WORLD FOR ME. 


193 


CHAPTER XIX. 

A WORLD FOR ME ! 

The sun was indeed getting low over the hills ; there is an 
intermediate sunsetting in these mountain regions that makes 
the double twilight and the manifold coloring a long and lovely- 
wonder. 

In the deep woods which they presently entered the day had 
cooled and faded ; the air was full of wet fragrance from every 
kind of aromatic stem and leaf that had been so lately steeped 
in the rain and shaken again by the warm wdnd. Every step 
pressed forth an odor ; the slant gleams of light searched into 
horizontal reaches of beautiful forest, beneath and among close- 
weaving branches that only the rabbit and the wild bird and 
their like could thread, the more charming and mystical because 
human creatures might only peer in and make to themselves 
sweet fables. 

Bernard Kingsworth made France use his climbing-staff ; he 
showed her how to plant it, how to time it with and make it 
help her own steps ; at hard places, where any spring or reach 
was necessary, he took her arm and partly lifted her across ; for 
the most part he quietly preceded her, turning aside the branches 
and choosing the smoothest way for her to follow. It was happy 
care to* him ; he was beginning to discern clearly how happy, 
and what a wish was growing with it ; for her, she took it as 
she took his teaching. He was greater and stronger and wiser 
than she ; it was good for her that she had known him ; it was 
a great deal for him to do, to accompany her and guard her in 
these little ways ; she felt safe, she felt a gratitude that was 
sweeter for her reverence, a reverence that was sweeter for 
her gratitude; she felt the nearness of the noble, that it 
quickens and ennobles one to feel : she was on a high occasional 

13 


194 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


plane ; it was a mountain-top of intercourse : presently she would 
come quite gladly down again with what the hour had given 
her, to be the better for it through many hours of commoner 
living, the week-day times and places that must be six to one 
until the whole world comes to a Sabbath that needs not to be 
set apart, — a city of habitation in which there will not have to 
be any temple. 

Do not think less of my heroine. I have taken her just where 
she was, among the “ Everidges ” ; there must be a great many 
of them among us a long time before the Kingsworths will be- 
come the common people. But I think she was noble in her 
place, and growing toward a nobler ; that is why I like her and 
have taken her. I only cannot make her quite in love with 
Bernard ; perhaps you, my girl reader, are not yet ready to be. 

When they came out at last into the fair, still light upon the 
open river, where the creek stopped the woodpath, and the 
thick forest-growth gave way again to low alders and birches 
and laurel-bushes, there lay the two little boats, — the lightest 
possible fishing-skiffs, that could follow the narrow, shallow 
waters and hide anywhere in the nooks and inlets of their mar- 
gins. Flip Merriweather, his striped shirt dried comfortably 
upon his back, and his coat still spread upon a bush where it 
had got such a drying as it might, sat waiting in one. Israel 
Heybrook was in the other. 

It was settled that Flip should take the minister and the 
load of berries, Rael the two girls. Flip threw his coat across 
the bit of seat between the bows; Mr. Kiugsworth took his 
place in the stern, ready to handle, if need be, the tiny tiller. 

Sarell w'as used to steering, and there were irregular, weedy, 
osiery patches in the river, and narrow bends between its sandy 
little flats, which, with three in the boat, would make steering 
needful. Would France mind the seat in the bow, — for which 
Racl had a cushion ready, — or, could she (it was very easy) 
manage the tiller 1 There was a slight, unconscious emphasis 
upon the “ could ” in Rael’s question, and a persuasion in his 
parenthetical assurance. He would rather, certainly, give her 
the best place; and France had steered a boat once or twice 
upon a pond. She thovight she would like to try again, under 


A WORLD FOR ME. 


195 


orders. Rael smiled ; they sat face to face with each other. 
Rael pressed his oar against the bank, and the boat slid forward 
on the smooth, golden water. 

Just as they parted immediate company, Mr. Kingsworth rec- 
ollected something. 

“ I had nearly left your letter in my pocket all night, Miss 
France,” he said ; “ for I had quite forgotten it, the mail-deliv- 
ery not being usually in the Thumble woods.” And he reached 
across to her a business envelope, with her name upon it in 
her father’s handwriting. 

France put it in her own pocket. “ I will save it till I get 
home ; thank you,” she said. “ It won’t be long to read. 
Papa always writes in a hurry, and sometimes he signs himself, 
‘Yours affectionately, George H. Everidge and Company.’” 

The girl laughed, with a happy note in her voice. Some- 
thing — the letter, or the golden light upon the water, or the 
novelty of the lovely river- way in the warm, hushed twilight, 
ending such a play-day after her long restraint — made in her, 
as they floated off with that delicious, dreamy motion, a vibra- 
tion of pure joy. 

It was the first time they had been together, she and Rael, 
since that night so long ago. This was the joining to that other ; 
and straight from the holiday in the woodlands and the hill- 
quarries, and on the steep-winding, glorious mountain roads, they 
slipped into this evening stillness and beauty with each other, 
— almost alone, for they two only were face to face, — under 
that color-lit sky and upon this outspread,, opal-shining stream. 

France would not pretend to know she was so happy ; she 
would not quite look at her own delight, lest she should find it 
out not all to be from the joy of the restful heaven or the drink- 
ing-in of the water peace. She sat silent. Rael, pulling up 
stream, and leaning to his oars, made obeisance to her in his 
heart every time he bent toward her. It was like something 
he did not think of, but which moved him gladly ; it was like 
the life-effort he could make — the pull up stream against 
whatever current — with such a face, smiling-happy, turned 
toward him, toward him alone. 

France began to sing — not words. She broke into a tremu- 


196 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


lous, deep warble of notes, that presently climbed into a sudden 
ecstasy. They fitted themselves to the transport of the mo- 
ment ; to the movement, up and on, into an ever unfolding tri- 
umph and satisfying of that wonderful hour, — the hour and 
the place were surely enough, — as it lingered and revealed itself 
upon the hill-tops, clothed in a hundred tints ; as the hill-tops 
changed, leaning and overhanging and sliding away, while they 
passed up beneath their glory or their shadow ; as the day, hid- 
ing behind those western summits, seemed to loiter there in a 
beautiful miracle, playing at going down, and prolonging and 
multiplying every gorgeous and tender phase of its declining. 
It was as if something of the Beyond unrolled itself in exquisite 
promise and foretouch ; as if great gates were open, through 
which one day — into which this day was transfiguring — they 
might sail in to an eternal blessedness. It made life feel as if 
its best were near. 

And the syllables of France’s song, if she had uttered them, 
as from some hidden, unthought impulse the music of it rushed 
to her lips, would have been that impassioned outpouring, — 

“ I shall meet him where we always meet ; 

He is waiting, waiting for me ! 

My heart is full ! I can hear it beat ! 

1 am coming, I am coming, — 

I am coming, my love, to thee ! ” 

It was a song she had heard only, she had not been used to 
sing it. Its music came first, then suddenly she recollected the 
words, and like the drppping lark’s or the hushing nightingale’s, 
all the effluent revel of sound quenched instantly in a deep of 
silence. » 

“ O, sing again ! ” said Kael ; and stopped with the three 
words, as she had stopped with her singing. 

“ 0, I can’t ! ” France answered and laughed. “ It sang it- 
self, and it left itself off. It was the sunset singing.” 

“ It was more like the sunrise,” said Rael; and again he said 
no more. 

Sarell was wonderfully silent. If she and Rael had been 
alone, no doubt she would have sung. It seems an instinct with 
young people to sing when they are riding or sailing in beau- 


A WORLD FOR ME. 


197 


tiful hours and places ; then the globe itself seems only some 
palace vehicle, and they borne on through spaces of an infinite 
life-ecstasy. They sing as the morning stars sang when they 
were born. And Sarell was nearly always singing, though she 
knew little music but the popular catches, and the Moody and 
Sankey hymn-tunes. 

But to-night, with these two there before her, and after France 
Everidge’s voice had lifted itself up in just that one strange 
strain, she did not feel Moody-and-Sankey-like. She hardly felt 
like Sarell Gately, the exuberant. 

This world is so full of strange “ might-be’s ” ! It is not the 
Maud Mullers alone who look back and sigh and dream in the 
potential preterite ; the might-be’s are all around us, every one, 
in the present. We see things we might live, if there were only 
a little more, or different, of us; there is but just such, and 
enough to give us the insight. We see into lives around us as 
we see into heavenly things, — truly, too, as we see into the in- 
fernal things. But for the grace of God,” and “Were it the 
grace of God,” are words with which we may put ourselves into 
any human places. We do it in that potential of us which is the 
protoplasm of our spiritual creation. Then — without sighing, 
just because we cannot bear to sigh — we take up the fact where 
we left it, and live on ; not quite as we should have lived, had 
we not seen, else why the vision % 

Sarell took up what she called her “ circumstance,” and con- 
tented herself with it : she knew what was for her, and what 
was not. Nevertheless, there was a certain something that laid 
a hand upon her, and quelled her down, in this near-coming, 
in her very outward sight, of that in which she coilld not be a 
part. 

What would it seem like to her that Rael Heybrook should 
say to her in that tone, “ 0, sing again ” 1 

She had very nearly made up her mind to marry Hollis Bas- 
sett, — he was her circumstance, — and to live at East Hollow. 
Yet here, at Fellaiden West Side, at the Heybrook farm, 
were all the happiest chances and episodes’of her experience till 
now, — the strongest and most loyal interests, too, though her 
equality and her possibility were elsewhere ; for was she not 


198 


ODD, OR EVEN V 


going to put herself where she could “ see to things ” that in- 
volved the Heybrook weal, and chiefly for that purpose 1 She 
could marry Hollis Bassett, if she liked, and “’pear out” at 
Wakeslow. An obscure tang of bitterness crept into her feel- 
ing, seeing these two as they were to-night, and thinking what 
she meant to do for Rael. 

Not that she saw so definitely what the two did not see for 
themselves : she only perceived the like to like, in an estate 
and order to which she could but almost, and with her farthest 
ideal, come. She could not have stayed there, any more than 
France could yet stay where Bernard Kingsworth abode in the 
spirit ; any more than the angels of the third heaven can be 
more than caught up into the first, or a man into the third. 

The strain upon us is hard ; yet but for the strain where would 
ever be our heaven 1 

Sarell was so quiet — turning half around, and leaning in the 
bow, trailing a bit of bush that she had been shading her eyes 
with in tlie softly parting water — that they half forgot her 
presence. It was easy to forget things that did not assert 
themselves. 

“ I have been talking with Miss Ammah again to-night,” Rael 
said. “ She has bought the Gilley place, — right out, house 
and all. She has given fifteen hundred dollars.” 

“ I knew she would buy it,” said France. “ She quite meant 
it. She only left you ‘to get used to it’ she said.” 

“ I shall never get used to it so as not to feel her goodness,” 
said Rael. “ She insists that it is for her own pleasure ; and I 
suppose in a way it is, or I could not take it easily at all. She 
is fond of Fellaiden, and she is younger and a good deal 
stronger than my mother. Our home, I suppose she thinks, 
may not always be open to her.” 

Rael was rowing slowly ; the other boat — Flip was an expert 
oarsman ; he spent more time in pleasure than Rael Heybrook 
did — had worked ahead. The intricacies of the river were be- 
ginning ; it bent and twisted here under the crags ; and little 
bushy islets, grown up on ledgy rocks, divided the current, and 
made its depth and force irregular, as it shot and wound along 
their broken stretches. 


A WORLD FOR ME. 


199 


“ Now the tiller, please ! ” Rael said to France. “ To the 
left ; that bears us to the right, you know. Ease a little ; now 
bear a little more. Keep for that white point of bare rock in 
the projection of the Thumble woods.” 

France got eye and hand together, feeling the working of the 
tiller, and sat intent ; her look fixed, like a pilot’s, on the mark. 
Rael smiled to see her earnest fidelity, that was, perhaps, be- 
yond the occasion. It was in her, though, for the occasion that 
should need ; and the smile had that recognition in it, also. 

They swept round under the shiide of the mountain ; a rocky 
promontory behind them put its curve about them like an arm, 
and walled them from the southwest ; the gentle south slope of 
Fellaiden Hill reached upward from across the river-line as they 
followed the shadowy bend that was like a little tarn. Over 
them, the clouds were pink and flame-color, and the blue was 
tinted with chrysoprase. In a cradle-dip of the high horizon, 
between two swells of dusky green, the young moon was lean- 
ing her soft white breast toward the vanished sun, like the 
downy breast of a bird. Further north, through a saffron 
glow that almost veiled it, burned the ineffable spark of the 
evening star. 

“ Oh, stop ! ” cried France ; and Rael lifted his oars. 

They were all alone there. The other boat had already 
passed around. 

A whip-poor-will began to sing. Its clear, sweet notes cut 
through the still air with swift repeating lashes of sound. Not 
“ whip-poor-will,” but “ a-world-for-me — a-world-for-me,” its 
lone, rapt whistle seemed to say. 

“ Do you hear that 1 " asked France softly. And then she 
translated it. 

“ I hear it now,” said Rael. “ I suppose I felt what it was, 
before. I often have.” 

“To-night,” said France, “we are here. It is not all for the 
whip-poor-will. But how many nights there is nobody here, 
or in the ten thousand other places that are being so beautiful. 
That is what I think in those lovely wood-corners, where no- 
body goes. Once in years, somebody finds them, and has that 
strange pleasure of finding that is half a puzzle why they are 
hid away so.” 


200 


ODD, OK EVEN V 


“ Perhaps that is why, and enough," said Rael. “ Or, I sup- 
pose pleasantness is pleasure, somehow ; a fact, independent of 
our finding ; or else it would n’t be to be found. I don’t sup- 
pose we can be pleased without a pleasure, any more than we 
can hear without an atmosphere that is all alive with sound, or 
see without a sunlight that is full of its own pictures. I sup- 
pose it is all there ; that it is — ’’ 

But if the thought completed itself, it was not in speech. 
He left the sentence there. 

The whip-poor-will finished it. “ A-world-for-me — a-world- 
for-me,’’ he kept saying. 

The “ Good Pleasure ” for which “ all things are, and were 
created,” a living, loving Reality in these “ waste places ” of 
beauty, waiting for the children and the creatures — human 
souls and little birds — to come, and to share it ; for the 
human souls to be touched by it, so as to find, if they will, that 
which is ever dividing itself, as bread, for them ! 

Hidden away, the waste places, for that “ why ’’ and that 
“ enough ” ! Prepared, adorned, like festal chambers, for a kind 
surprise, where the Heart that has devised it crowns its own 
divine delight with the happy wonder of the “little flock" to 
whom it means to “ give the kingdom.’’ 

Close to that Great Heart, and so the closer to each other, 
the girl and youth found themselves, and kept silence, and lis- 
tened to the Word of it, that — virgin-modest before the sacred- 
ness — neither ventured to speak further. Not “religious," 
either of them, they thought, and therefore shy of a religious 
utterance; but I wonder if the vital thing were not growing 
in them, with that pleasantness which w’as a Presence all about 
them, and that something scarce understood, and no less a 
Presence, in their hearts 1 

I wonder if that moment, and that thought, and that point 
in their young lives, and that lovely river and sky solitude, had 
not all been meant for, and bearing toward each other, in those 
Purposes that we are so apt to think cannot be purposed, — 
ever since — and before — those waters and those skies were 
made 1 

“ I shall meet him — I shall meet her — where we always 


A WORLD FOR ME. 


201 


meet ! ” Was not the song singing itself along those unspoken 
reaches of the spirit, where they were beginning to be sure to 
find each other 1 

And yet France would have shrunk, still, from analyzing that 
moment, or from explaining herself to herself. There was still 
something in her that would have revolted, if she had asked 
herself why this last half-hour had been the crown and fulfil- 
ment of the whole beautiful day. 

So she did not ask, but drifted on in the half-light that was 
so I’osy, that must be so brief. 

It was not far, after that, to the Little Crossing, — a narrow 
neck in the river, where a chain of stones made foundation for 
a bridge, built with single planks clamped down to the rocks, 
and a single hand-rail running along its upper side. 

The best landing for the boats was upon the Thumble shore ; 
Flip’s was already drawn up there, and he and the minister had 
ci'ossed the bridge, making room for the others to follow. Sarell 
was over while Rael was hauling his skiff out upon the gravel ; 
she was used to foot-bridges and dam-crossings ; then Rael 
stepped before France upon the plank way, and turned to reach 
his hand toward her. She answered the motion by one of her 
own, just holding a hand ready, if need were, to take the help of 
his. So, with offer and acceptance not actually joined, they 
passed the pretty, rippling current between the jutting banks; an 
old, bent, butternut tree, leaning over from one side, making a 
shady cavern above the bridge, in which the dark pool of water 
lay shining with its very blackness. France paused, for a sin- 
gle step, in the middle, and looked over into it. As she looked 
up, she met Rael’s eyes. 

“ That is another of the ten thousand,” she said, smiling. 
“ I begin to think they are all right here in Fellaiden. I think 
if the summer could last, I should never want to go away.” 

If Rael Heybrook had answered that in words, he would have 
said less. Perhaps, indeed most likely, for her look went 
swiftly back to the river, France did not see the flash in his 
face. She could not know the quick leap of the pulse in him 
as he moved on so staidly the few paces further, and then, at 
the steep little rough-beaten ascent of the bank, leaned back 


202 


ODD, OE EVENV 


and reached the hand again that she put hers into now, and 
drew her with a firm grasp upward to his side. 

The minister bade them good-night. Their paths lay cross- 
fields now, and his was a different way from theirs. Flip kept 
on, helping with the baskets. Rael let him have one, saying, 

“ All right, Phil. I ’ll drive you home, presently.” 

Sarell marched steadfastly in advance. Flip followed. Still, ' 
Israel and France were left together. 

The moon slipped down beyond West Ridge. Her slender 
horn turned golden as it dipped behind the line of dark green 
wall. It curved upward, showing, before it quite went down, 
like the horn of a gi’eat golden ox, lifting its head from pastm*e 
in the translucent sky-fields on that fui-ther side. 

They crossed the ‘ brook, presently, that ran below the Plea- 
saunce ; then they climbed the rounded slope of the Great 
Mowing, quite up out of the valley-basin. 

The farm-house door was open, and there were people on the 
porch ; a bright light was already burning where they were not 
always used to have lights in these summer evenings, — in the 
west parlor. 

Somebody came forth to meet France as she crossed the door- 
yard from the field gateway, and Rael turned up toward the 
bams. 

“ My dear little girl ! ” and Mr. Everidge put his arm about 
his daughter and kissed her. “ You did not even get my let- 
ter,” he said. 

“ Why, papa ! ” exclaimed France, tremulous with surprise. 
“ I have just got it, — in my pocket ! ” And then, with some 
strange feeling, she put her arms quickly about his neck, and 
kissed him again, breaking into little sobs and tears. 


NIGHT AND MORNING. 


203 


CHAPTER XX. 

NIGHT AND MORNING. 

Of course, they said she was tired and nervous ; that the 
surprise was too much for her ; that she had had a long, hard 
day, too hard for the first after such a shutting-up : and they 
took her in, and gave her hot tea and cream-toast, and some 
beefsteak off the slice that had been broiled for her father after 
his journey, for they were all waiting supper for her. And 
then Mr. Everidge told her how he had suddenly determined 
to take a vacation of a day or two, and that Princeton and Mag- 
nolia were both too gay and dressed-up to rest in, and that he 
had made up his mind to come and look after his little lame 
child, and finally, that he had news for her that he had chosen 
to come and tell her himself, — “ good business news,” for one 
thing ; she was the little daughter who had alw'ays, years ago, 
in the old days before they were all fine, brought his slippers 
and climbed on his knee, and asked him “how bidnits wad 
to-day 1 ” and he thought she had a right to know. He would 
tell her all about it to-morrow ; but he had been making a 
great deal of money, and she should say how some of it should 
be spent. 

He told her all this on the piazza after tea, when they were 
out there by themselves. He was curiously talkative, with his 
gladness at getting her again, and his good fortune that he had 
come to tell her of. 

And France sat close beside him, and held his hand in hers, 
and felt something that she could not understand, — of self- 
reproach, and a kind of shame that she was not his “ little girl ” 
any longer ; as if she had been daring to grow up all at once, 
she scarcely knew how, into a woman without asking leave. 

She sat very quiet, and listened to him. She did not seem 


204 


ODD, OR EVEN 't 


eager to ask him questions. She hid herself away, as it were, 
in her daughterhood, nestling by his side, almost as if she had 
just been forgiven for something, and been taken back there. 

After she had taken her candle and gone — still just like a 
child, because he told her it would be better for her — to her 
room, she set the light down upon her dressing-table, and ran 
to the low roof-window, and sat down upon the floor, leaning 
her head upon her hands upon the sill, and cried again, feel- 
ing her cheeks hot under her tears, blazing hot, all the time. 

She was confused, distressed. The coming of her father had 
suddenly confronted all things past with all things present. She 
felt herself in a different relation to everything : was it a true 
relation ? or, where was the truth 1 where was the right and 
the glory, and where was the shame 1 All her training, all the 
subtile, daily religion — for it was a creed, a cult, a binding — 
of social life in which she had lived, rose up in judgment now, 
and held her at the bar, indicted, if not convicted, of some 
strange, half-discerned trespass ; and the accusation lay in the 
un whispered demand, the demand of his mere presence, “What 
would her father say ? ” Unwhispered. She did not ask her- 
self. What had she precisely to ask herself about 1 About 
what should her father say anything 1 

Why was she reminded with a pain, instead of a pleasure, of 
the life and place she must go back into, quite separate from this, 
in which she had had a brief summer-time of new delight ? Why 
were there such separate worlds of living in this one world and 
life of human creatures 1 Why would not her father under- 
stand 1 Why would he be amazed, yes, disgusted, if he knew all 
she had given to-day, of her purest sympathy, her highest esti- 
mation, — all the warmth with which she had exulted in her 
own finding and claim as she gave it, — to this nature and 
character of a man, a young man, quite out of her sphere, 
reared among the plainest, used only to the plough and the 
hoe, the hay-field and the milking-yard 1 Could she not come 
here for a few weeks’ country idling without getting — infatu- 
ated 1 — Faugh ! 

Was it her own, or her father’s imagined disgust that made 
her break from her thought when an actual word thrust itself 


NIGHT AND MORNING. 205 

forth, like a writing on the wall of her consciousness, a shape 
formed suddenly in the chaos of her reflections ? 

Why was she afraid he had come to take her home again 1 
Why had she not dared to ask, or given him any chance to tell 
her 1 What was that tender compunction that had made her 
as if she had been disobeying, or injuring him, secretly? 

Why could she not be wholly glad of the good success he 
came to tell her of, that was going to make their ways more 
free and splendid, and even more established ? Why did she 
not want to be drifted so far that way ? That money that he 
had been making in some larger way than usual, how could she 
care to say how it should be spent ? As if people could spend 
money just as they would choose! as if other people, whose 
plans and hopes all depended on a little money that perhaps 
they could not get, would let them ! Oh, what a tangle life 
was, and she only just beginning it ! 

Yet, after all, what had she done, and what was there wrong 
in her 1 and where was going to be the dreadful difficulty 1 Had 
not Miss Ammah made friends and sympathies here 1 Did she 
not care for this brave fellow, Rael, and his plans? Was not 
he, were not all of them, — Bernard Kingsworth, the minister, 
dear, good Mother Heybrook, and Lyman, with all his boy- 
roughness and awkward wit, — her great friends ? 

They were her own great friends also. She was thankful to 
have made them. It was grand here, among the hills, and with 
these fresh, simple-strong people. Why had she been catechiz- 
ing and tormenting herself? She would show her father some- 
thing of her new world, that was more than country air or 
restful stillness or blank interval between points of more posi- 
tive and intense existence. 

She lifted her head. She had been so foolish, tired, and ner- 
vous. The far-away mountain-sides and shadowy peaks were 
softly dark in the still evening : they reassured her. The 
heaven was full of stars to its depths of depth ; Arcturus was 
shining, like a king in his own place, in the mid-altitude over 
where the sun had set. Everything about her was great, not 
small ; everything was pure, not spoiled ; the heaven and the 
earth were wider ; she had grown and climbed, not degenerated 


206 ODD, OR EVEN ? 

and descended. She was ashamed of her ashamedness ; what 
had it all been about 1 

To-morrow, she would take her father into some of this beau- 
tifulness : he would be glad, he would feel and receive it. He 
should know Eael Heybrook and the rest. On Sunday, he 
would hear Mr. Kingsworth preach. They would be standing 
in the same place then, they would come to see things to- 
gether, — she and this good father, so strong and wide in his 
own work and knowledge, whom she loved and was so proud of. 

If she could only coax him into a world like this, to live there, 
with the money that he had got ! 

And so France went to bed, and went to sleep ; and nine 
hours later, when day was regal over the great country-side, 
she came forth out of her chamber like a princess, and found 
her father, and led him to that low piazza with the magnificent 
outlook, to see the far-off river mists winding away southward 
between the steadfast mountains and all the rich farm-lands 
lying smiling, up and down on the hill-bosoms, in the morning 
sun. 

It was out here, while they waited for breakfast, that he told 
her his other news. 

Euphemia was engaged to be married to Mr. Sampson Kay- 
nard. He had been at Magnolia, where Euphemia had joined 
Helen and the Uppertons, and been with them for the past month ; 
and now he had gone with her and Helen to their mother 
at Princeton. Her mother was pleased ; everybody said it was 
a fine match. Kaynard was good-natured and rich, he was of 
good family, there was nothing against him. — “Only,” France 
thought, “ that they called him ‘ Samp. Kaynard,’ and he was 
sampy !” — He was one of those men you were rather tired of see- 
ing about in society ; but now he would settle and have a home, 
he would show better. Mr. Everidge had no objection ; Eu- 
phemia was suited. He would as lief there were a little more 
of “ Nature’s nobleman ” about the fellow ; but as men go, he 
was better than the ordinary. 

There was a little emphasis upon Euphemia’s name : she was 
not the nearest in sympathy to her father ; she was not France. 

This marriage was great news. It would make much to be 


NIGHT AND MOKNJNG. 


207 


new and different. This and the good fortune — had they any 
latent connection, France wondered! — that her father spoke 
of so differently from that of any mere good voyage or rise in 
merchandise that had often given him prosperous seasons 
before. 

Why did it not trouble her, as things did last night 1 Why 
was the string, that had vibrated so painfully then, less tense 
this morning! 

It was morning, that was nearly enough. And all this gran- 
deur of God’s making, so far beyond the playhouse grandeur 
of cities, was about them, visible again. Her father’s words, 
too, that “ Euphemia was suited,” and of the “ Nature’s noble- 
man ” that he could wish his son to be, — this father to whom 
his daughters must bring him sons, since he had never had son 
bom to himself, — something in these seemed to free and 
justify the girl again, upon her higher degree and with her 
larger, new-found standards. 

At the very moment that she was listening to what he said 
about this “ well enough ” Mr. Sampson Kaynard, Israel Hey- 
brook, in his w'hite shirt-sleeves, and with his proud, firm step and 
his uplifted forehead, passed below them across the field that 
was but a little bit of his free estate. Free, because the power 
and intent were in him to make and keep it so. Real estate 
indeed ; not the kind, in prospective city lots or outlying 
suburbs, which cramps men in a poverty of heavy tax and 
delusive expectation ; but real and rich with all the earth holds 
in it for him who can truly subdue it ; splendid and satisfying 
with what men expend hard-won fortunes to get a little piece 
and miniature of, in some place where they can hold it joined 
to the artificial living and open to the admiring gaze of people 
who value earth by the foot, and the outspread and adornment 
of it by what costly gardeners and professional beautifiers can 
do to tame it down. 

Something that was not hers at'all, — that she knew herself, 
as well as she had known last night, most separated from by 
all that might seem to be hers, — made France feel proud, that 
moment. 

It was morning again with her ; and the day was full of sun- 


208 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


shine, — sunshine that no one could shut away into any one 
little measured place, or keep from her. 

It was later in the day, after breakfast, and a walk with the 
young men over to the Gilley place, whence Mr. Everidge re- 
turned in a fine humor of enjoyment, entering keenly into the 
speculative advantages of the purchase and the plans concern- 
ing it, and greatly praising Miss Ammah’s shrewdness — the 
last quality that had entered into her motive, on her own part, in 
the transaction — and the practical capacity and good sense of 
“ that young farmer,” that they came round, by natural con- 
nection, to other enterprises, and the fuller explanation of what 
Mr. Everidge had himself been doing. 

First, however, Miss.Ammah had put in her protest. 

“ I hate shrewdness,” she said uncompromisingly. “ It ’s per- 
verted wisdom. It ’s brawling for one’s self in the world’s mix. 
It ’s an ill thing, and close to cursing. Look in your Webster 
for that. I did n’t buy Gilley’s for shrewdness. I bought it 
for what it just is, one of the loveliest bits of the rind of this 
earth. And I mean to have it kept so. But now, friend 
Everidge, we ’ll have thy wisdom, and not call it shrewdness. 
You wei’e going to tell us what you have been doing in that 
mix of things down below, where you usually come uppermost. 
You have been ‘diving deeper, and coming out drier,’ than 
common, eh 1 ” 

And Miss Ammah drew out her yarn comfortably, starting 
afresh on a long row. She looked sharply, though, at Mr. 
Everidge, as she put her demand. 

The merchant laughed ; he was used to her tirades, and he 
was honest ; so he meant and thought. He did not much 
mind her hurling Webster at his head, for his “ shrewdness.” 
Yet he felt what he had to say coming into a curious light, 
beginning to say it just after that. 

“ I ’ve been making a dip into those silver mines ; and I 
have come o\it electro-plated. That ’s all,” 

Mr. Everidge shook the ashes from his cigar over the piazza 
railing, and laughed, slightly, again. France, searching for a 
nice, imperceptible grade of color among her violet wools, left 
off her comparisons, and lifted up her head. 


NIGHT AND MORNING. 209 

“ Money does stick to some people,” remarked Miss Tredgold. 
“ Are you sure you are out ] ” 

“ 0, yes ! That is precisely the thing one must be sure of. 
It’s like those intensely cold mineral springs you bathe in, 
down there in Pennsylvania. It ’s in, and right out again. If 
you do it just right, you ’re a made-over man, twice as alive 
as you were before. But if you stay a minute too long, you 
might n’t ever come out alive at all.” 

Both the women had stopped all pretence of work, and were 
looking at him now. 

“ I wonder,” said Miss Ammah, “ if the prophet of Kho- 
rassan w-as n’t electro-plated. His last dip finished him, you 
know.” 

“ Should n’t have taken it,” said Mr. Everidge concisely. 

Then what did he leave the tub standing there, for? You 
don’t talk quite as you ever talked about business before,” said 
Miss Ammah. 

“ No. This is n’t business. It ’s a thing that happens once 
in a man’s lifetime.” 

“ How much has happened to you ? How much are you 
made over?” Miss Ammah asked bluntly. She never used 
much ceremony ; and she had known Mr. Everidge, in her 
straightforward way, for more than thirty years. 

“Just how much have I made, you mean. Well, you’re a 
confidante, my wife trusts you when she turns her dresses : I 
had in about twelve thousand, and it came out multiplied by 
fifteen.” 

“ Papa ! ” cried France ; and the wools fell mingled again in 
her lap. That was an announcement ! Miss Ammah looked 
just as equipoised as ever. She waited long enough to give 
point and seeming to her next sentence. 

“ George Everidge,” she said, then, in her calmest tones, “ / 
want a dip.” 

“Better not,” he replied to her. “Better let well enough 
alone.” 

“ Why should n’t I be electro-plated ? ” 

“ Because you might get your skin taken oflF, instead.” 

“ Oh!” 


11 


210 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


Miss Ammah let that syllable and tone continue isolated an 
instant ; then she said, “ I hope you ’re going round, now, to 
tell all the women and fools not to jump into that tub that 
you ’ve left standing. Because it ’s what some of them will 
be sure to do when they see you shine so.” 

“ Is it best to tell women and fools not to do a thing I ” asked 
Mr. Everidge, laughing. 

“ Papa,” said France, coming round to the red settee at her 
father’s side, “ please tell me all about it. I don’t understand 
about ‘ dips.’ How could you make all that money so quickly I 
I thought mining was slow work.” 

“ So it is if you dig and smelt. But the rise in stocks antici- 
pates. The bonanza was there, sure enough. As soon as you 
know that, the money is there. Then, you see, it would bear 
more shares, and we who knew first had the first chance to buy 
in. It was all real,” he answered to the look in her face, “ solid 
and sure. Then the premiums ran up. I sold on the first 
rush ; I got what my shares were worth. That ’s what we call 
‘ realizing.’ ” 

“ I should think the realizing would have to come after- 
ward. Why did n’t you stay in, and get your pay out of the 
mine 1 It might have been more ; and why would n’t it have 
been safer 1 I think if I had part of a silver mine I should 
rather keep it. You always say it is so hard to know where to 
invest.” 

“It would be safer, Fran’, if you could control. Safer, and 
pretty slow. But you see, apart from interest, an honest man 
would rather sell what he knew in his conscience he had to sell. 
Mining is queer work, and stocks are paper. It is so easy to 
make more paper when the name is up ; and by and by, maybe,, 
receipts won’t cover, or there comes a stop. The sure way to 
make money out of a mine is to make it out of the first fact of 
a mine.” 

“ But it goes on,” said France, “ all that paper-making. Your 
selling out does n’t stop it. And somebody, one of these days, 
when your shares get down to them, — or what your shares are 
cut up into, — will get what isn’t worth anything!” 

“ If they don’t look out they may. People should infoi’ra 


NIGHT AND MORNING. 


211 


themselves. The mine is there. It is not a fable. But if 
the boat won’t float more than twenty men, the twenty-first 
should n’t jump aboard.” 

“ I should n’t think it was done in the right way,” said 
France. 

“Few things are from beginning to end,” said her father, 
“ that ’s why the beginnings are best. But you can’t under- 
stand all about ‘ bidnits,’ little girl ! Your part comes in after- 
ward. You won’t be upset by it, I can see ; therefore, I shall 
think the more of your voice in council. There are plans in 
the family already. What would you think of a house in town 
for the winter 1 ” 

France drew a long breath as if brought back from somewhere. 
In truth she was not in any way so overw’helmed with the pros- 
perity as a woman of older or more chequered experience would 
have been. She had alw^ays had everything ; she was used to 
knowing that her father had made money, — ten, twenty thou- 
sand, more sometimes, in a year. That he should have made a 
hundred and sixty-eight thousand in a month or two was 
merely a relative matter. The difference made even less rela- 
tive impression. If Mr. Everidge had “ realized,” his daughter 
scarcely had. There were other things, — principles and remote 
bearing, — more or less vaguely presenting themselves to her 
mind. 

“ Papa,” she said, gravely pressing to her cheek the hand that 
had come around her neck and laid itself upon her shoulder, 
“ if ever I should want to spend some of this very money for 
you, will you promise to let me do it 1 ” 

“ You shall have your share,” he said fondly, “ and some day 
you shall spend it for yourself.” 

Miss Ammah had rolled up the big afghan that she was 
crocheting together. She had risen now, and was walking 
toward the house-door in the angle. 

“ 0 ! ” she said, turning back to Mr. Everidge, “ I had for- 
gotten to congratulate you ! ” 

Which queer congratulation, if it were that, the gentleman 
received with the amusement Miss Ammah Tredgold usually 
excited in him. 


212 


ODD, OU EVEN V 


They did not see Bernard Kingsworth that day. He was at 
home, writing his sermon. 

In the afternoon Flip Merriweather came, spontaneously, and 
took Mr, Everidge off with him to his skiff and the creek, to 
show him the trout pools under Thumble. 


SUNDAY, AND A SEKMON. 


213 


CHAPTER XXL 

SUNDAY, AND A SEKMON. 

There is never any Sunday in a novel proper. The seventh 
stitch is dropped, and the thread catches directly over from Sat- 
urday night to Monday morning. Stories are purely secular. 
There is nothing of the inside that determines or affects them. 

I have given you a bit of one Sunday, and of what it con- 
tributed to the essential history underneath the narrative with 
France Everidge and the rest ; and now Mr. Everidge, her 
father, having come up here to Fellaiden expressly for a mer- 
chant’s holiday, of which the Sunday is the centre, I am not 
going to skip it, but shall tell you of the day, and of Bernard 
Kingsworth’s word for the day. 

The conclusion of the syllogism is, that this is no novel. 
Herein I anticipate the critics. I give you ffiir warning that it 
is Sunday, and that there is going to be preaching to-day, as 
the railroads put up their crossing-boards and bid you beware 
of the engine while the bell rings. 

The bell was ringing from the little white belfry, of no par- 
ticular architecture, under the northern crest of Fellaiden Hill. 
The sound had to surge up and ripple over ; then it floated 
down and ran into the valley and all along the quiet slope, where 
the grain-fields lay shining with mute praise, and the unyoked 
oxen grazed in the still pastures, and the farmhouses and barns 
had a placid hush upon them ; men were resting, or giving 
themselves the more ample refreshing of Sabbath ablutions and 
fair, clean linen ; the women were doing the needful work of 
the day’s mere existence with a leisurely touch that was in 
itself a rest from the drive and energy of the purposeful week 
that must begin again to-morrow ; the children were in their 
best little jackets and frocks and shoes, with here and there a 


214 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


frill or a ribbon bespeaking the blessed holiday, different and 
safer from soil than school-days ; the very hens walked about 
more sedately, and as if there were less upon their minds con- 
cerning even the laying of their Sunday eggs. 

You cannot leave the Sunday out of the country ! It seems 
there as if it would come round, though men did not keep it. 
Everything hushes down ; it is different from the very dawning. 

Mr. Everidge had found himself in no such quietness for a 
dozen years. He had spent Sundays at watering-places with his 
family : things were dropped off there that made a faint compara- 
tive change ; the bowling-alleys were let alone, and there was no 
croquet or tennis or dance in the evening ; but all day long there 
were the toilets and the promenades, and the newspapers and the 
talk of the men and the smoking in the reading-rooms, and the 
same clatter and serving of prolonged meals, and perhaps even 
more driving up and away of carriages and consequent work and 
hurry at the stables. Here he felt as if he had been lifted off 
the busy planet and set in some asideness, where the whirl of it 
had gone away from under his feet and left him in a fair mirage 
only of its serenest pictures. 

It seemed quite mid-day, after the long, beautiful morning, 
when the wagon came to the door for the church party. It 
was the big double wagon, with the two horses. Mrs. Hey- 
brook and Sarell were both going ; the afternoon tea-dinner was 
all prepared for ; and the three visitors, it was taken for granted, 
were going too. 

Mr. Everidge had never been to church in a three-seated, 
open country wagon. There was something queer about it, 
something incongruous in his scrupulous, stylish, town street- 
suit and his high hat ; he felt curiously like something driven 
about in a show ; he was really a sti'ange species here. The 
women were less so : a man’s elegance, when you separate it 
from its like, is something a great deal more pronounced than a 
woman’s. A woman may be loud, tawdry ; then she is not ele- 
gant. But men have certainly reserved to themselves, in their 
apparent relinquishment as to forms and colors, a severe dis- 
tinction, which makes their dress or undress a most conspicuous 
matter in the case of a sole example. 


SUNDAY, AND A SERMON. 


215 


There was nobody at all like Mr. Everidge on the way, or 
around the church doors, where masculine Eellaiden was con- 
gregated at the moment of their arrival. It was worse yet, in 
the square little interior, as he walked, expressly tall, up the 
middle aisle-way. He was used to a place of worship where 
there were stately, high-backed pews ; a gentleman passed in in 
a quiet shadow, and a woman’s silk trailed, out of sight and 
noiseless, upon the soft, thick carpet. Here, all was in a broad 
light; and the white-painted wainscots, with their red-stained 
top rails, seemed hardly higher than his knees. His very hat, 
again, was obtrusive, as he carried it in his hand. Really, he 
was glad to be seated, with a hedge-row of shawls and bonnets 
in front and rear. 

When a door opened, however, beside the slightly elevated 
platform, which, with its plain arm-chair and reading-table, con- 
stituted the pulpit, and Bernard Kingsworth walked in to his 
place, where he stood a moment with bowed head behind the 
desk, as if entered into the Presence that is always with the 
simplest two or three that may gather together in the One 
Name — Mr. Everidge ceased to feel that he was uncomfortably 
the only “ gentleman,” technically speaking, in the place. 

When, after the quaint and somewhat vociferous singing, 
the reading of a Gospel chapter, and the utterance of a brief 
prayer — in which the chief element seemed to be a consciousness 
that the Being addressed needed not to be told anything, but 
that the man who prayed, and his people, needed to be told 
everything, and that they had come there to listen to Him 
who had given his Word, and promised the teaching of his 
Spirit — the sermon was begun, there was but one thing to be 
thought of in that little breezy, day-lighted meeting-house. 
Everybody, unless the little children, forgot himself and his 
neighbor, as to bodily presence ; compelled, by the keen pre- 
sentment of more live relations, to apprehend himself and his 
neighbor in the regard of a certain inevitable, everlasting unity 
and identity. 

“Jesus himself stood in the midst of them.” That was the 
text. 

When Solomon dedicated the Great Temple, the preacher 


216 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


said, we hear that “ the king hallowed the middle court'"' There 
he offered his great sacrifices, his burnt offerings and his peace 
offerings ; because the mere symbolical “ brazen altar before 
the Lord was too little to receive them.” 

It has always been the middle place that the Lord has made 
holy ; not anything outside, or above, or separate. “ The 
tabernacle was in the midst of the camp,” and “ The Lord God 
walked in the midst of the camp.” “ The Tree of Life was in 
the midst of the garden,” and in the City of God, watered 
by the glad-making streams of the crystal river. He Himself “ is 
in the midst of her, that she shall not be moved.” When the 
Lord would signify the greatest. He “ set a little child in the 
midst of them”; and “in the midst of the throne, and of 
the living creatures, and of the elders, is the Lamb as it had 
been slain.” 

The Story of the Scriptures is full of his declarations : “ I 
will dwell in the midst of Israel ” — “ The Lord is in the midst 
of Thee ” — “ This is Jerusalem ; I have set it in the midst of 
the nations and countries,” and “ I will be the Glory in the 
midst of Her.” 

Samaria is in the midst, — Samaria, with her sins and her 
idolatries ; and the Lord “ must needs go through Samaria.” 
And when at last He gave his mortal life, as a sign of the 
everlasting life that He evermore giveth for the life of the 
world, it was in the midst that He was crucified, between 
the thieves. 

My friends, it is a necessity of all life that it should be “ in 
the midst.” We are none of us above or below, absolutely ; it 
is a law that we must needs all be between. 

I can only suggest to you, here and there, points where it is 
evidently so. The entire correlations of humanity are the in- 
numerable fibres and intermovements of a body of life which is 
in truth the Body of God’s Life ; and in that infinite and be- 
yond our tracing. 

But first, we are between in our daily business and calling. 
I am between ; you are between ; every man who handles, to 
make use of, or to pass on, anything that the Lord creates, or 
any force He puts where we can touch it to move it — there- 


SUNDAY, AND A SERMON. 


217 


fore, every fanner, artisan, tradesman, mechanic — is a power 
and a will between some cause and effect, some giving and re- 
ceiving. He is “ God’s minister, attending continually on this 
very thing,” 

I suppose you see at once how a man who stands in a pulpit, 
who handles the Truth of God, and breaks the bread of the 
Lord’s giving to the disciples, is a “ minister.” You call him 
so, and rightly ; he should stand between Christ himself and 
the Christian Church, to receive and to give continually. But 
you, also, who till God’s ground, and take from his hand what 
He gives through his life that is in the earth and the waters 
and the sunlight, are you not ministers, — high priests at a 
grand, beautiful Altar, which you dare not profane 1 

You take at first hand from the Maker. Through you. He 
provides the daily bread all the world is daily praying and cry- 
ing for. He makes them to sit down in their places, by the 
fifties, by the hundreds, by the hundred thousands, and to you 
He divides that which is to feed them. lie multiplies, not 
you : you only serve. It is high service, though ; you are be- 
tween the great, rich, abounding, God-alive earth and the hun- 
ger of the children. Yours is the first calling, without which 
the others could not be. Will you work like the angels, — 
doing the Will that is done in heaven 1 or, forgetting that Will 
and thinking only what is to remain to yourselves, will you do 
self-will, which is devil’s will 1 

If you hold back, in time of scarcity, what the Lord’s summer 
has ripened and you are ready to sell, if you mix bad with 
good, old with new, if you strain weight or measure to make it 
cover more than honest money’s worth, — then you do devil’s 
will ; every man knows that. But there is even a greater 
righteousness than the Scribes and Pharisees’ — the righteous- 
ness that has for its motive such love for the neighbor, such 
joy in producing all that the wisest skill and patientest labor 
can produce for the waiting want, that this love and joy be- 
come, to whosoever has them, his life and delight in doing ; not 
the desire and pleasure, foremostly, of his own, and what he 
can gather up to himself in return for it. Is this a hard say- 
ing 1 Can you not yet hear it 1 It is what the Lord means fo* 


218 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


you by putting you here among his hills and beside his streams. 
It is what He who gives his own flesh for bread means by tell- 
ing you that you shall not live by bread alone ; that the flesh 
profiteth nothing ; that the word which proceedeth out of the 
mouth of God, that a man shall live by ; the words of the 
Christ that He speaks unto you, they are spirit, and they are 
life. 

You are not all farmers, though ; you are men of trades, 
some of you, and some of you men of trade. You do work for 
your neighbor ; in his house, for his clothing, in tools for his 
use ; you buy for him what he has not time to go and buy for 
himself — this man who is getting all your bread out of the live 
ground — and what he does not know how to buy. You must 
have his bread for your service, or something from him that 
will entitle you to what you want from your other neighbor. 
But will you think most of good service or of great receipt 1 
Will you buy cheapest and then sell dearest, or will you give 
your friend the benefit you pretend to give him, when you set 
yourself up in your occupation of attending to that which he can- 
not attend to himself 1 Will you do your best for your neighbor, 
or will you do your best for yourself, and let your neighbor look 
out sharp for his own part, if he does not want to be cheated ? 

The work of the world widens out into great things ; things 
that make great stir and show upon the earth ; great running 
hither and thither, wonderful contrivance to run quickly and 
fetch largely. Great fleets of ships are upon the waters ; and 
the men who build and sail them, that the remotest askings 
and supplies may be brought together, that human life may 
be made fairer and richer by all that the whole planet holds for 
any human being — they are men of noble calling. 

Our Loi’d Jesus passed his whole life in one small region ; He 
only went once to the great sea-coasts of Tyre and Sidon ; and 
then He did not go to wonder at, or praise, the ships that w'ent 
down upon the mighty deep, or the merchant enterprise of the 
cities ; but only, so far as we know, to heal the daughter of 
the woman who w’as not of Israel. Yet He who ever “ stood in 
the midst ” touched and illustrated all the springs and methods 
of life. He loved the little ships that went out upon Gennes- 


SUNDAY, AND A SERMON. 


219 


saret : they were as true types as the great Phcenician vessels 
that sailed to far-off Tarshish. He often entered into them, to 
pass over from side to side, or to speak the word from the still- 
ness of the waters. And when He “ entered into a ship, his 
disciples followed him.” We read that continually. I wonder 
what a ship stood for, to the thought of Jesus? A thing with 
white sails set to the winds of heaven, moving by that invisible 
power over the other element upon which man may not move 
by his own natural forces, with an errand in its going, always, — 
what is it but a will, set to the breath of a divine sending, 
moving by that breath when it might not move without it, and 
doing a commissioned errand? When Christ entered into a 
ship, H(B entered into some purpose of His Father’s. And I 
think He did it so often, to teach that all the errands of the 
earth should be the errands of God’s wdll. 

Do the merchants build and sail their ships so ? Do they 
enter into this highest joy, this depth of the reach, of their 
calling ? I cannot say ; but I can see how it should be, and 
how blessedly it would be, in all the wonderful ways given unto 
men to work in, if they “ knew the time of their visitation ” 
and “ the things that belong to their peace,” and did not let 
them be “ hid from their eyes.” 

And so with all the making and transporting and interchange 
of the whole world ; from the digging in mines to the coining 
into money ; from the planting of the cotton-seed to the weav- 
ing and stitching ; from the study of the physical powers and 
the adaptation of machinery, to the landing at each man’s door 
of whatever men want in their homes for use and beauty, — 
all is divine ; each servitor stands as a priest in his place, to 
minister between the last and the next, in the “order of Mel- 
chizedek.” 

But what shall we say of the false service that seeks to stop 
or to gather back the ministration unto self ? It is a break 
and a confusion ; it was never meant ; there is no act of it that 
does not frustrate some beneficence ; it stands between to curse, 
to hinder, to starve ; it has to do wdth all the misery and the 
disorder and the sin that it tries, with its own hedging of law 
and luxury, to put out of sight. No man stands between to 


220 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


take, as the gift passes on, regardless of what remains for the 
next taker, or the hundredth after, who does not take the 
children’s bread and cast it to the dogs of his own covetous 
desires. No man receives an extortion, no man makes money 
by a fancy price, no man shuffles a thing quickly through his 
fingers, because it is sure to burn somebody’s fingers on its way, 
who does not traffic in infernal fire. 

What shall we say, sometimes, of a standing between that 
seems to us a noble interference! An interference between some 
unjust purpose and its fulfilment! A taking into our hands, 
perhaps, of some clever countermoving, whereby we may pre- 
vent or recompense a wrong ! 

Take care, lest we cast out evil by anything of Beelzebub. 
Take care, lest our love of triumph, of our own cleverness, our 
hate of the sinner that we call hate of the sin, move us to for- 
get that the best place, the real place, the first place to be tried 
is between the tempted soul and his Satan, not between the 
conception after it has taken form, and the mere outside 
event that we would frustrate. What if we would not rather 
the evil should be in that soul, than that we should not have it 
to frustrate ! 

What shall we say, again, of those passive standings between, 
in which self is but a waiter on wliat it may blaspheme as 
“ Providence ” ! What of watchings, of calculations, of evil 
wishes against others, that thereby something we think good 
may come to ourselves! Of the mere “ What if it should hap- 
pen !” that we let the thought of into our minds to dwell there, 
the thought of failure, disgrace, death, that may befall sortie- 
where, and in consequence of which we may take the chance, the 
vacant place, the goods left for next ownership on the hither 
brink of a grave ! What of a man’s nature come between in 
such case, and between what and what does it stand! Do 
w'e always know! 

Brothers, sisters, we are not merely fleshly men and women ; 
we are spirits. We do not know what we handle when we aim 
and fix our secret thoughts, our wishes, our expectations. I 
have stood beside an apple-tree, and willed an apple to fall 
down. I cannot tell you the connection ; I can only tell you 


SUNDAY, AND A SERMON. 


221 


the fact ; but the apple fell while I stood there. Do not stand 
wishing, waiting, for that which may happen to a fellow-crea- 
ture, or in his life. You do not know what power you may have 
hold of, or how your secret sin may work for you, making you 
guilty of the event. 

Our first accountability is deeper than issue or act ; it is 
away back in our very selves, and what we give ourselves to, 
there. “ We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against 
principalities and powers ; against spiritual wickedness in high 
places,” the high, incorporeal places of our own being, and the 
substantial, inward world with which we make ourselves related. 
We may be between celestial forces and the work of heaven, or 
between satanic forces and the work of hell. The field is the 
world ; the evil seed is the planting of the Evil One. Again, 
the field is the world ; and there is fair, sweet, true harvest in 
it ; the Sower is the Son of man, and the tenders and the 
reapers are the angels. 

“ Spiritual wickedness in high places.” They may be, out- 
wardly, the high, withdrawn places of refinement, of moral, 
decorous life, of a life far separated and defended from the 
horrible life that makes prisons necessary, and a peril to lurk in 
lonely ways and out of the open sunlight, for the innocent. 
They may be the high places of simple, safe life like yours, in 
these mountain shelters. But I dare to tell you, that not a 
man of cleanest outward standing, of proudest peerage with 
other men, can have a hidden uncleanness or violence in him, 
that does not belong to, and work with, by the law of soli- 
darity in good and in evil, the kindred evil that runs most dread- 
ful riot beyond all social pale and recognition ; that does not 
quicken the pulses of it, and make it more fierce, and the deeds 
of it to break out in greater cruelties and shames. I dare 
to tell you, that not a woman wastes a foolish hour before her 
glass, or steals one of God’s days that He has lent her for His 
work, for the excessive decoration of her own dress, who does 
not touch, like Achan, “the accursed thing,” the poison of 
self-covetousness, and make it ranker in the earth ; because of 
whom, giving that much of her life into the tide of sin, there 
is not some great wave swelled higher, out on the open deep. 


222 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


that breaks, away down there among the reefs, in wreck and 
horror she would not herself confess so much as to know of. 

I tell you that here, in this quiet country-side, where seldom 
any great sin comes to light to startle us, you may be just in 
this way guilty of the world’s wretchedness of iniquity, that 
you keep alive in your own soul some breath that would be of 
it if it gained volume and vent, and could rush forth with its 
like that make the tempests. It will get forth, and it does ; 
though you give it no body of act, and you think your hands 
are stainless. It was the dragon’s breath that slew, without 
the touch of his talons ; and it is every little drift of air, — 
perhaps even so little as the fanning of a bird’s wing, — set- 
ting along its own way through the quietest spaces, that finds 
at last the gulf-currents of the atmosphere, and helps to whirl 
up the terrible cyclone. 

You sit and read your newspaper; you read of felonies, of 
thefts and murders, and things that ought neither to be done 
nor told of ; and you may read as thousands, I am afraid, do 
read, so as to be a part, yourself, of the dreadful story ; a part 
after the fact, because you get your daily or your weekly news 
out of it ; and your news would lose its spice if these things 
were not happening. There is a spiritual supply and demand, 
as well as a material : you are a part of an awful power, if you 
demand or delight in these things. They will keep happening, 
so long as there is that in human nature which will even hear 
them with any sort of strange recognition or entertainment. 
There is a realm in which and from which they work and flow ; 
as the clouds are taken up out of the sea, and fall in floods, 
and make the rivers ; and the very life of you must be part of 
a sea that exhales everywhere and gathers into a body and a 
power for an outpouring in the earth, — where, perhaps, you 
know not, — of the open works of righteousness or sin. 

Will you say, then, that as this earth is made, or has become, 
there is no standing-place remaining for the man who will touch 
the ill thing neither with the right hand nor with the left 1 
that we must take matters as they are, and do the best we can 
with them 'i that we cannot be more particular than our neigh- 
bors, since w'e are piece and part of this human being which. 


SUNDAY, AND A SEKMON. 


223 


for good or evil or the mixed two, has constituted itself already, 
before we ever came to help or hinder ; and no one man, any- 
where, can so set himself against the established order, as to 
alter its conditions 1 

Then I tell you, that One Humanity has so set itself, and 
has called us to that same kind of humanity, if we will be born 
to it ; and to that same work of reconstituting the human be- 
ing, which is not fulfilled or established yet, nor will be till all 
the rulings and servings of it become those of the kingdom of 
the Lord Christ. And the longer any man persists in just fend- 
ing for himself with things, — good or evil, as he finds them to 
his hand, — just so much the more is the wilderness enlarged, 
and the thorny tangle ot it manifolded ; just so much the longer 
must it be, and by the multiplication, too, according to eternal 
powers and proportions, before “ the Lord shall comfort Zion, 
and all her waste places ” ; before He “ will make her wilderness 
like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the Lord.” 

Stand each man in his place ; it is all He asks of you ; the 
whole place is His ; and stand for the Lord ! You may seem to 
be alone ; you may not be able to fit your life to the lives of 
your fellows. To what did the Son of God fit His life 1 He was 
alone in all the earth ; there was no work or abiding on it for 
Him ; the foxes — they of craft and greed — had their holes, 
and the birds of the air — the light, inconsequent ones, who 
troubled not themselves — had their nests, — the devouring of 
seeds, also, by the wayside ; but the Son of man had not where 
to lay His head. His meat and drink were only the work of 
His Father against the world, and His home the Heart of His 
Father in Him, as He gave His life to be between that Heart and 
the suffering, sinful hearts of men, to turn them to it ! 

You may be called to do strange things, — hard things, even 
though small, for you to do. But the things are yet to be done, 
if there shall not be destruction after destruction upon the easy 
and familiar and unrighteous doing. The world is wrong — we 
must face the fact of it ; and that it cannot be a wholly peace- 
ful place to live in till the redemption of our God has fully 
come upon it. But it cometh, it draweth nigh ! The powers of 
judgment are mightier than the powers of desolation ; we know 


224 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


not what shall be His magnifying of the smallest act, done in th«* 
remotest part, for His name. He did His mightiest works on 
earth in Galilee. 

For He Himself abideth in the midst, where He said He would 
be, — in all the powers of heaven and earth. 

He is in the midst — in the inmost — of the smallest and the 
furthest ; of every smallest and of each most separate. That is 
how the whole place is His; that is how He is the Judge of 
the whole earth. 

In the midst of your individual work, interest, thought, the 
very hope and intent of it is His, more than, and before, your 
own ; and He will carry it through, if only your face is set 
toward Him, and your will in the way of His commandment. 

He has occasion and fulfilment for you all ; He has not made 
one too many, nor put one in a needless or forgotten place. 
There is not one particle too much, or of no consequence, in all 
the star-dust of His universe ; there cannot be a human soul, or 
a human soul’s experience, too much or too little in the making 
of His heaven ; the very hairs of your heads are all numbered, 
and the hairs of your heads are every little outgrowth and par^ 
ticular of your living. 

It is His own life in you that makes your life ; it is His own 
wish for you that makes your wish. I do not mean to tell you 
that His way will always run along with your way. What you 
think is your wish is sometimes only your way. Then He wnll, 
by His way, teach you, and give you, better; for “the Lord’s por- 
tion is His people, and Jacob is the lot of His inheritance.” 
Therefore is your life holy. It is the tabernacle of the Lord of 
hosts, else were he not the Lord of hosts ; and “ there He will 
meet, to speak unto thee,” with every one of the children of His 
Israel ; and “ the tabernacle shall be sanctified with His glory.” 
“ Shalt thou not build a house for me to dwell in 1 ” saith the 
Lord. 

“ Hearken unto me, my people ! and give ear unto me, 0 my 
nation ! for a law shall proceed from me, and I will make my 
judgment to rest for a light of the people. My righteousness is 
near ; my salvation is gone forth ; and mine arms shall judge 
the people. The isles ” — the least little separate places — ■ 


SUNDAY, AND A SERMON. 


225 


*• shall wait upon me, and on mine arm shall they trust ; the 
heavens shall vanish away like smoke, and the earth shall wax 
old like a garment ” ; all these things that seem unchangeable, 
unconquerable, shall be made to pass away ; “ and they that 
dwell therein^' and not in me, “ shall die in like manner : but 
my salvation shall be forever, and my righteousness shall not be 
abolished. Hearken unto me, ye that know righteousness, — 
the people in whose heart is my law ! ” 

After the benediction there was a little waiting, as there ' 
always is in a country church, when the menfolks have to go to 
the sheds for their wagons, and the women have each other and 
the minister to speak to ; for after sermon, the country minister 
comes really into the midst of his people ; the old women and 
the little Sunday-school children are about him. The Sunday- 
school will assemble directly, and the old women who have come 
“ some ways,” as they say of distance, have their baskets of 
luncheon, and will stay over the nooning for the afternoon 
service. 

Mr. Kingsworth, coming down from his slight external height 
and separation,* had these people, to whom every Sunday was in 
this way a communion, to join his hand to and to say his word 
with : they had looked forward to it all the week, and would 
think of it all the week after. He visited them in their houses 
faithfully, and his coming was a festival to some of their hearts. 
But this coming down direct from the Mount of Teaching, — it 
was as if the gift of especial healing and help were in his first 
touch, as it was in the hand of the Lord, when he came down 
from the Transfiguration. 

He made no haste for his own, — to get that clasp of the 
hand, and that recognition in the eyes, shining already with the 
beautiful joy of her listening, that from France Everidge was a 
beginning of what his aloneness here had craved ; he would miss 
it altogether, rather than let one of his poorest parishioners miss 
half a glance from her share of him to-day. But the pew-door 
was near the front ; they were soon face to face ; the shining 
look gave him thanks more, than it knew, and more, possibly, 
in its gladness, than it would have meant, if it had known. Her 

15 


226 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


hand rested an instant in his while she said, “ This is my father, 
Mr. Kingsworth ” ; and the two gentlemen exchanged courteous 
greetings. Then the little tide in the aisle crept, with a fresh 
movement, a few paces onward, and they were gone, and Ber- 
nard Kingsworth was left to his old w’omen and his little chil- 
dren. 

Rael drove the horses home ; Mr. Everidge sat in front with 
him. 

“ That was a surprising sermon your minister gave us to- 
day,” he said to the young farmer. 

“ Yes, sir,” Rael answered. “ Surprisingness is exactly the 
quality of Mr. Kingsworth. He seems to tell us everything, 
almost, there is to tell in every sermon ; but the next time, 
there is everything again, in a new way, from some new look- 
out. No matter what his text is, he touches the very mid- 
dle point always. His PjTamid is always in the centre of the 
whole earth.” 

Rael made his allusion with a smile, as he glanced at Mr. 
Everidge, not doubting, probably, that a man like him knew all 
about the pyramids, and the last interpretation of them. 

But Mr. Everidge was surprised again ; and there was as 
much blankness in his return glance as a gentleman used to 
polite conversation ever lets appear. “ I was going to say,” he 
remarked, with a slight emphasis, that confessed the changed 
impression of the last half minute, “ that I should think such 
preaching was rather shooting over the heads of a good many of 
his people.” 

“ In that kind of shooting,” Rael replied, “ it ’s hard to shoot 
over a man’s head, if you once get it lifted up. And that ’s 
what Mr. Kingsworth’s surprises do for us. A man’s measure 
in some things, I take it, is made to be about the same, 
isn’t itr’ 

This time, Mr. Everidge fairly turned round for reinforce- 
ment. “What do you say, Fran’] Do you think they all 
took it in ] and where do you suppose the young man himself 
got it all, and will any of it be lived out, here in Fellaiden ] ” 

“About all I can’t say, papa, till I ’ve got where Mr. Kings- 
worth saw it. The beginning was Miss Ammah’s bread cast 
upon the waters. She gave him the text.” 


SUNDAY, AND A SERMON. 


227 


“ I never did in the world ! ” Miss Ammah contradicted, 
amazedly. And then, with the easiest inconsistency, demanded, 
“When?” 

“ Down at home, last spring, one morning at our breakfast- 
table, when you asked me to come up here with you. Don’t you 
remember the ‘ betweens ’ and the ‘ middling,’ when you said 
papa was a grocer 1” 

Miss Ammah looked sharply at her. “ H’m ! and you ’ve 
been telling him that ! How came you round to it ? ” 

“ It happened so,” said France quietly. 

And then her father said again, “ I wonder if he brings 
them up to his standard here 1 Will anybody trade stock or 
sell crop accordingly?” 

“ I have known dealing done here, in Fellaiden, accordingly,” 
said France. And a proud inflection threw itself up in her 
clear voice. 

“ Then the man lost who did it,” said Mr. Everidge. 

“No, he only paid what the thing was worth. I mean, he 
told the man what the thing was worth that he wanted to 
buy ; and it was more than he might have had it for.” 

“ And did n’t get it, of course. There never would be two 
such parties to a bargain. It ’s precisely what you can’t de- 
pend upon. The world isn’t made so yet, as your preacher 
confessed. An offer to pay more than a man had expected 
works his price right up another notch ; an offer to sell as low 
as can be afforded runs your property down below affording. 
You can’t help it. Everybody undei-stands. There ’s a way of 
talking in trade, and it won’t do to invent a new one. It is 
like phonetics in spelling: the old fashion may be really more 
trouble in itself, but it ’s a worse confusion to change. Mat- 
ters come round to pretty much the same point, either way. 
There ’s an actual value in things that business men know, or 
ought to ; and there need n’t be cheating : but there must be 
judgment and keeping your own counsel, or there would n’t be 
business. He was all right as to principle ; but the method 
can’t be altered by one here and there, any more than spelling 
or language. Custom is the language of life. If a man under- 
takes to stand by himself, he ’s simply an odd one. He does n’t 


228 ODD, OR EVEN ? 

fit ill anywhere, and he does n’t count. He can’t do any 
good.” 

“ I beg your pardon,” said the young farmer at his side. 
“ But dorCt odd numbers count ? The number that begins or 
advances is odd, in the order of numbers. It is the coming up 
that makes even, and the odd numbers were the sacred num- 
bers. It seems as if there were something in that.” 

Mr. Everidge laughed. “ I see he has got you" he said ; 
“ and I am afraid you did n’t get your bargain.” 

“ I have n’t lost any bargain, sir,” Rael answered, with a curi- 
ous, fine ring in his tone, the antiphon, perhaps, to the clear, 
sweet pride that had been in France’s. And at that moment 
they drove up to the farmhouse door. 

“ There was another thing,” observed Mr. Everidge, as he 
and Miss Ammah walked through upon the west piazza. “ He 
made very little account of civilization. Now a decent man is 
an advance upon the brute, and the proprieties of life are a 
certain sort of religion. People are bound to something by 
them, and kept out of something. If it were n’t for good 
breeding, I don’t know where Christianity would be.” 

“ Put it the other way,” said Miss Ammah. “ If it were n’t 
for Christianity, where would good breeding be ? ” 

“ The old Greeks and the Romans had something of it, I 
fancy.” 

“ Yes, a kind that made place for pretty much everything 
that breaks the ten commandments. And I don’t know that 
our good breeding, taken by itself, does much better. There ’s 
room in it for nearly what you please. Why, we should all 
be scratching like cats, for all good breeding, if there were n’t 
very polite ways provided for expressing the same emotions.” 

“ 0, I hope not,” Mr. Everidge said, in the laughing tone 
with which men dismiss a woman’s extreme but keen retort, 
and walking with a certain unrest of manner up and down the 
short piazza-floor. “ That ’s the right kind of preaching, though,” 
he resumed, with a conceding seriousness. “ If people heard it 
all the time, it would insensibly raise the standard. But no 
one man can raise it single-handed and at a jump.” 

Evidently the preaching was a difficult thing to be quite 
disposed of. 


SUNDAY, AND A SERMON. 


229 


Up in the little shed-chamber, Sarell Gately was laying away 
her hat and her Sunday ribbons. The many-pointed sermon 
had had its point for her; and she was, at the same time, laying 
away its application, to which she had arrived in her mind dur- 
ing the ride home, not hearing or attending to, in the rumbling 
of the big wagon, all that was being said so far forward of her. 
She had just precisely her own question to settle, not the prin- 
ciples of trade. 

“ It ’s the folks,” she remarked up here to herself, “ that I 
care about fust ’n foremost, an’ the fairness : I know that. 
An’ then, p’raps, it ’s the satisfaction, too. What ’d be th’ use 
o’ bein’ smart otherways 1 But, ef ’t war n’t too awful small a 
chink, an’ ef I could git b’tween Mother Pemble herself an’ the 
very oT Sat’n of it all, — well, I ’d jest like t’ do ’gzac’ly the 
smartest thing that could be did ; an’ I guess that ’d be about 
it, sure enough 1 How’ver, I ’ve got t’ ketch her fust, any way. 
It ’s all one road, t’ll I git that fur.” 

And Sarell pinned her clean bib-apron to her shoulders, and 
took her way downstairs. It was comfortable that the light 
upon her path showed no doubtful fork in the road immediately 
before her feet. 

France, looking in her glass as she removed veil and bon- 
net, saw a face glowing yet rose-red, and two eyes shining 
in the glow like morning stars. She could not help being 
glad to be so pretty ; but she would not look again or think 
about it now. 

She had been glad of such nobler things, she would not 
descend to any petty “ midst ” of self. She would not spend 
that “foolish” half-minute, even, that would take a crumb of 
the bread she had been fed with, and fling it to the dogs. 

She had listened to the brave, lovely truth : was that all 1 

She had set it side by side, as it was told, with a brave, lovely 
doing of the truth. She would be proud of that. What should 
hinder 1 Rael Heybrook was her friend, she could understand 
him. She thought the more, not the less, of herself for that. 

She intrenched herself so resolutely beside Miss Ammah. 
Miss Ammah liked, praised Rael. Where the w^oman could 
titand, the girl could. 


230 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


She hated so those two whispering, stinging words, “ pro^ni- 
quity,” “ infatuation.” Nobody could apply them to Miss 
Ammah. 

With this piece of sweet-clover shrub she armed herself, to 
keep off biting insects ; and bearing it, she drifted peacefully 
on into her intangible dreams. 


MONDAY. 


231 


CHAPTER XXII. 

MONDAY. 

It really seemed as if all Fellaiden had been waiting for 
him. What would it have done, if he had not come there for 
those three days'? And surely in this country nook there was 
no end of surprises. 

When Mr. Everidge came out from his breakfast on the Mon- 
day morning, there stood Flip Merriweather on the front door- 
stone, waiting to secure an early word with him. 

Not in his Sunday best, he knew better than that. He had 
lifted his white Sunday straw hat to the merchant, standing on 
the church steps yesterday : he had taken care to let him see 
the country youth as he could present himself. To-day, he 
was not in shirtsleeves and big field hat, but in a suit of clothes 
and head-gear something between these and the evident get-up 
of rest-days or dress-days. He took his hat off as Mr. Ever- 
idge came through the hall, held it without fumbling, and raised 
his eyes without abashment to the gentleman’s face. He knew 
better than to be confused or to hesitate. 

He had been very bright, knowing, agreeable on Saturday. 
He had asked intelligent questions, and listened intelligently 
and attentively to replies. He had fished for trout, he had 
caught trout. If he had fished for anything else, he had shown 
neither hook nor line. 

This morning he came with a straight errand. He had found 
out how a man like Mr. Everidge would like to be approached, 
if approached at all. 

“ I don’t want to take up your time, sir,” he said. “ I came 
to ask something that can be asked in half a minute. I 
want a chance in the city ; to learn business, and get it. I want 


232 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


you to find, if you can, a corner among your workers that you 
can put me into, to work and learn. I don’t care if it ’s a coal- 
corner, if I can only get further some time, I ’ve got money 
enough to keep me for a year, and I don’t ask pay. But I 
want to get out into the channel ; 1 ’ve been up the creek long 
enough.” 

“ Is this a new idea ? Is it my coming that has put it into 
your head 1 ” 

“No, sir. I’ve been waiting for my opportunity, and study- 
ing out how I could possibly make it. Now, if it’s come, I 
won’t lose it for want of finding it out.” 

Mr. Everidge liked this. Flip knew he would, and meant he 
should. He stood perfectly still, held his hat still, and kept 
his eyes on the merchant’s face, 

“ Do your friends know ? ” 

“ They know what I want, and mean. I ’ve only my sister and 
her husband. Doctor Fargood. He can tell you about me. 
I ’m with them till I can do more.” 

It happened that a young shipping-clerk of Everidge & Co.’s 
was just now in rather failing health. He would, probably, 
not hold out at his work through a Boston w’inter ; he might 
do something in their employ in the West Indies ; meanwhile, 
it had already occurred to Mr. Everidge that it was time to put 
another in the line of training. He reconsidered this, in a new 
connection ; ran over the brief promotion list in his mind, and 
settled where a wide-awake fellow like this might fit himself, in 
a few months, to drop in. He was silent for just about the 
half minute that corresponded to Flip’s ; then he said, right 
out, and at once, “ I like your way. I ’ve no doubt I could do 
something with you. I ’ll put you on the wharf, under one 
of my shippers, and you may see what you can learn, and 
how fast you can come up to it. There ’s enough to do. I ’ll 
give you five dollars a week, at first ; then, when you ’re worth 
more, I ’ll pay you by the month ; and if you prove yourself 
worth while, in six months I ’ll put you on a year’s engagement 
and salary, at five hundred dollars. You’ll earn that, if you’re 
any use at all.” 

Flip could n’t help the flash in his eye ; but he kept it steady, 


MONDAY. 233 

wliile he said, “ Thank you, sir, heartily ; it ’s more than I 
expected.” 

“ When will you be ready ?” 

“ I ’m ready now.” 

“ Go down with me to-morrow, then.” 

And Philip Merriweather bowed, and departed from the 
presence a made man. He walked quietly across the yard and 
roadway ; when he had disappeared behind the hay and corn- 
barns, he cast one quick glance around the fields, then 
dropped himself upon hands and feet, and turned three or four 
cart-wheels of pure boy-joy. After that, he picked up his hat, 
left the boy forever behind him, as if then and there and by 
that ceremony, he had cast the slough, and marched down the 
Great Mowing, not looking round, or caring who there might 
be to see him as he went. 

France got her father to herself for the rest of the forenoon ; 
she had him about with her in all her nearer haunts ; they 
were both very happy. 

France told him about her friends ; she did n’t say quite so 
much about Rael as she had meant to say ; but she set forth 
the household life and character, and the oneness of Miss 
Ammah with it, and her active interest. She told all about 
the Gilley bargain ; she knew it had been partly explained 
already, and that it was no secret. Mr. Everidge acknowledged 
that there was common sense between the high morality of the 
transaction and utter Quixotism ; he thought very well of 
young Heybrook. He thought well of that other fellow, also, 
Merriweather ; he knew what he was about ; he was going to 
give him a chance with himself. France was really glad ; she 
was proud of her father’s power and generosity. 

The sermon sat more comfortably to-day in Mr. Everidge’s 
mind ; he had “ stood between ” to some kind and efficient 
purpose, this morning. As he reviewed his career in the light 
of this reminder, he recalled many places where he had so stood 
between ; many a comfortable independence, some rising for- 
tunes, that owed their beginnings to him. A business man 
had opportunities ; certainly he was responsible for them. 

Other and opposite satisfactions recurred to him, occasions 


234 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


when he had hindered or discouraged what might have led to 
risk or loss for others ; as he had done, or thought he had done, 
with Miss Ammah herself, but two days since. A little older 
instance was in his mind, for which he took to himself especial 
credit. 

“ Women and children should n’t meddle with dangerous 
machinery,” he said to himself. “ They ’re sure to take their 
fingers off in a hay-cutter.” 

They talked a little about the minister. France spoke of 
him as she felt. “ I think there is n’t one man in a hundred 
like him,” she said. 

“Then why on earth does he stay up here, in this corner!” 
asked the man of values and markets. 

“ I believe he is quite able to stay where he likes best,” said 
France. “ And he seems to have chosen to stay here ; at least, 
now. I should think anybody who could might choose to 8tay\ 
here, papa ! ” 

“ Then you ’re not ready to go home with me ! ” • 

“ You did n’t come for me ! You did n’t say so ! ” 

“ And you did n’t ask. I knew very well it would n’t do to 
risk my authority ! But my little Fran’ must n’t get weaned 
altogether away from us ! ” and he laid his hand, fatherly-loving, 
upon her shoulder. 

France was furious with herself for coloring up so. There 
was neither reason nor connection in it. She put her hand up 
and laid it upon his, but she kept her head so that her shade 
hat shielded her face from him, and she hoped he had not 
noticed it. 

She spied a four-leaved clover, as she looked downward on 
the grass. She sprang away from him to pick it. Then she 
came back and made him a little presentation of it. “ It was 
growing hot,” she said. “ Should they walk back toward the 
house 1 ” 

They had all the Great Mowing to climb, from the shady 
brookside. It was just a little breathless, in the eleven o’clock 
Bun ; and they did not talk much more by the way. 

In the afternoon came Bernard Kingsworth, with his light 
buggy and his little Morgan. He came to ask Mr. Everidge*’ to 


MONDAY, 


235 


drive with him to the High Mills Village, and around by the 
“ Under-Mountain Road,” beneath the precipices of Thumble, to 
the East Hills and the ravines, and back over Fellaidcn 
Height. 

Before Mr, Everidge had made the circuit, he had seen 
enough to modify his idea of the “ corner,” and his question 
as to how a man, “ like whom there was not one in a hundred,” 
should choose to stay in it. It would seem to be just that sort 
of a man, indeed, for whom it was worth while to have been 
made. He had, also, received his fourth surprise. 

On the homeward turn, while they were slowly descending 
the steep terraces from the Centre Village, with the grand out- 
spread before them of six hill-ranges, from the dusk of the 
overlapping slopes of Heybrook Farm to the high, pale, misty 
blue of the Vermont peaks, up and down whose indented 
horizon-line the sun travels his clear-traced path from solstice 
to solstice through the year, Bernard Kingsworth spoke of that 
which he had but just begun to read, in any word -shape, in his 
own mind. The last two days had been full days, days of 
revealing ; and by Mr, Everidge’s sudden appearance, the young 
minister was made all at once to see himself in a very definite 
light, — a light in which, now that he had come, he felt bound 
to show himself to France’s father. 

“ I cannot let you go away, Mr. Everidge,” he began, after a 
few moments’ silence, as they came over the crown of the hill, 
“without saying something to you that it may seem very pre- 
cipitate, almost presumptuous, to say, seeing that you have 
only known of my existence these two days,” 

The merchant wondered. Was it to be a piece of evangeliz- 
ing? Was the gospel to be “'brought home to him,” after what 
he had heard was the fashion in primitive Puritan places ? He 
hoped this young man, who had preached such a strong sermon 
yesterday, was not going to stultify his work to-day with any 
such bad taste. He had had a conversation with him that he 
had thoroughly enjoyed} many things — among the rest, Philip 
Merriweather and his new prospects and interests, of which 
Mr. Kingsworth had spoken with the clearest good sense, with 
the sort of sympathy and perception, also, that were consistent 


236 


ODD, OR EVEN V 


with his chai-acter and relation to the youth, yet without a 
particle of cant or prejudice — had come up for mention and 
discussion between them ; and every word of the young minis- 
ter’s might have been said by one quite unprofessional, yet 
would not have been said by any one of a less noble type of 
manhood. 

Now, what, all at once, did this peculiar, personal exordium 
preface 1 

Mr. Everidge sat quite silent, leaving the burden of whatever 
it might be altogether to his companion. 

“ Your coming is a part of the event,” the young man said. 
“ It puts me in a position which makes that binding upon me 
which I might not yet have felt bound to seek. I do not know 
yet my own chances of hope in it. I have only made sure that 
I do hope for it, more earnestly than I ever before desired any 
earthly thing. Not an earthly thing, either. Mr. Everidge, 
may I ask your daughter if she can care for me as I care for 
her ] ” 

A positive swift pain contracted Mr. Everidge’s forehead, 
and even whitened suddenly about his lips. Nobody had come 
and asked for something right out of his very heart before. His 
little Fran’ 1 The girl that was just older than his little chil- 
dren, and not grown, he had thought, to the womanhood of the 
elder ones, that had somehow separated them a good deal from 
him? His one safe, sole, especial daughter ? Let it come from 
whom it would, it was a blow. 

He could not help Bernard Kingsworth’s perceiving that. 
He did not care to. He did not speak a word for many seconds; 
then he said briefly, though the saying came slowly, “ I have 
only known of you, as you say, for these two days.” 

“ Yes,” said Bernard Kingsworth. “ It seems almost like 
highway robbery, I know. But I had it to tell you.” And a 
smile, that was very gentle in its comprehension of the other’s 
feeling, just moved his lip, while his tone was at once tender 
and strong. 

“ I beg your pardon. Of course, I can see what you are, 
Mr. Kingsworth. T’/m, however! There are many things — ” 

“ I could take care of her. She should never miss anything 
she ought not to miss,” 


MONDAY. 


2S7 


“ It is n’t that, altogether,” said Mr. Everidge hastily. A 
man’s instinct is to repudiate calculation, when the cpiestion is 
of a man, wiio is a man, giving his wiiole self, with all, he it 
more or less, that he may have, be, or can do, and only be- 
seeching a girl that she will take him. And yet the question 
has to be of money also, and the ditterence that money or no 
money makes. So Mr. Everidge added honestly his “alto- 
gether.” “ But her life has been so different. She has had so little 
time. 1 can’t wish that the subject should be brought to her 
just yet, in any way. I can’t spare her, yet, to anybody ! I 
wish you had not asked me this, Mr. Kiugsworth.” 

Mr. Kingsworth kept silence for a minute or two. Then he 
said, “ Put yourself in my place. Could I have done other- 
wise 1 ” 

“Why must the man he in his place!” was the impatient 
mental response ; but Mr. Everidge knew he was unreasonable. 
He waited again a little before replying. 

In the five minutes already since the shock came, it had 
begun, as all shocks do, to grow familiar. He began to see the 
other side of it. It was like the mountain they had just come 
round, — a long, green slope on one hand, on the other, an in- 
stant, precipitous plunge. 

Bernard Kingsworth had had all summer for this fact to 
grow in him ; there were only these five minutes for him to 
declare it in. Five minutes, in which, so independent is fact 
of time, it had been able to become almost as an old matter to 
himself. 

A great deal had been able to pass through his mind, and 
range itself about it, giving it established place and relation. 
The swift resistance of his own feeling, the reaction to a fair 
acknowledgment of what was due, not only to this gentleman, 
but to his daughter — how' did he know what the summer had 
wrought in her also ! The first impulse to carry her directly 
away with him, out of this threat, this danger; the recollection 
that if the mischief w'ere done, that would be of no use, and if 
not done, the very best thing would be for Bernard Kingsworth 
to find it out, and not be coming down after her to Boston ; 
where, with longer time, it might befall. 


238 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


He began to be rather glad, upon the whole, that the man 
was in what looked to himself such a hurry ; he had confessed 
that he knew nothing of his own chances ; he could not have 
gone far, nor France have met him with much consciousness 
or encouragement. Now, with the permission he was asking 
for, he must speak, and get his answer. 

But his France, up here, in this little farming parish, the 
parson’s wife, on, probably, something like six hundred dollars 
a year ! 

“ It was n’t that, altogether,” indeed ! but he began, on that 
point of it, to feel, certainly, a little angry. 

He hoped to leave her ten times as many thousands, some 
day ; but it was all afloat in his ships and business now ; even 
this last fine return of speculation could hardly be counted as 
a thing to be abstracted and divided. He could do better by 
her, doubtless, in consequence j but there were five of them ; 
and as long as a man lives, and continues business operations, 
all he may have is never too much for foundation and moving 
capital. 

“ I see,” he answered aloud, after all this had been flashing 
through him in such space as he could leave Mr. Kingsworth 
absolutely unanswered. “ You have known her all summer, 
and I you but two days. Allow, merely, for the difference.” 
And he smiled in his turn. “ After all, it must rest with her, 
other things being proved possible. I do not see, since the 
question has come to exist between you, but you will have to 
ask it of her. — Only — I can’t give my little girl up to any 
hardship. I am trying my best to earn a hundred thousand 
dollars for her, before I die.” 

It was in this way, scarcely a bad one, on the whole, that he 
managed to put forth that ugly money consideration, which 
must always be a consideration. 

Mr. Kingsworth smiled ; it was a pleasant, easy play of face, 
but moved from no such depth as it had been before. 

“I hope you may,” he said, “if you desire it. But mean- 
while, a good long meanwhile, I hope again — she will — would 
— not need it. I have a hundred thousand dollars of my 
own.” 


MONDAY. 239 

He said it as quietly as if he might have said his little par- 
sonage house was a very comfortable one. 

Mr. Everidge was exceedingly glad of having spoken in pre- 
cisely the order that he had ; it would have been awkward if 
his proviso had drawn forth this information before he had given 
any other sort of answer. 

Even then there had been nothing said of General Kings- 
worth, the uncle in Montreal. Nor was there, although Bernard 
told him, briefly, that his ties of kindred were very few ; an only 
sister, younger than himself, being all that was left of his im- 
mediate family, their parents having died in his own boyhood 
and the daughter’s babyhood. 

There remained something for Miss Ammah to add, when 
Mr. Everidge talked with her about it for a few minutes in the 
evening, managing to keep her for that purpose, after he had 
bidden France good-night, and while he smoked a supple- 
mentary half cigar. 

On the other hand, Miss Ammah herself had known nothing 
of the amount of Bernard Kingsworth’s present independence. 

“ I will have nothing mentioned of the matter, though,” Mr. 
Everidge concluded. “ I shall tell nobody at home. Fran’ 
shall do as she pleases ; and I sincerely hope she will please to 
belong to me for a dozen years to come. How coolly these 
young fellows step up to ask you for your daughters ! as if you 
could have no further use for them yourself ! ” 

“ That ’s a piece of the making of the world, or the keeping 
up of it,” said Miss Ammah. “ That ’s where you are only a 
between again.” 

And, as usual, she had the last word of it. Mr. Everidge 
flung the end of his cigar away into the grass, and went off to 
bed. 

So the Monday was over, and the Tuesday came ; Mr. Ever- 
idge went back to the city and his counting-room, taking Flip 
with him ; and France was left, with even a tenderer good-by 
kiss than iisual from her father, but all unknowing why, and to 
what he left her. 


240 


ODD, OE EVEN? 


CHAPTER XXIII. 

PLANS, A PLOT, AND A PLEADING. 

The next was a week of glowing, thundery weather, — short, 
sharp flashes of storm, between fervid noons and superb, sweet 
sunsets. Mrs. Heybrook was still “ overdoin’ ” ; but where so 
many people underdo, there remains nothing but that such as 
she should carry the giant’s end of the tree while the lazy 
dwarfs sit chirrupping in the branches. A demand came from 
East Hollow for a two days’ loan of Sarell. Elviry was away ; 
Care’line was “ all beat out with the work and the thunder.” 
Farmer Heybrook looked sober ; Israel frowned ; Mother Hey- 
brook “didn’t know how,” and then, as usual, consented with- 
out knowing. That same day occurred the severest, and the 
last, of the thunder-gusts. We shall hear more of it elsewhere. 
The minister had not yet been at West Side. 

In the serene afternoon of the day succeeding the tempest 
France ventured a long walk again. She went with Miss Am- 
mah and Rael over to the Gilley Place. 

There is a great charm in going over a pleasant, empty dwell- 
ing. One fills it with all the possibilities. 

The Gilleys had been gone several days ; the thing had been 
said and done together. They had not had much to take 
away ; there had not been much to dispose of. They had sold 
some things ; some things had been given away ; Miss Ammah 
had paid good prices — not the prices fashionable collectors pay 
up in the country where the value of the fashion has not come — 
for some solid, ancient pieces of furniture, that were still stand- 
ing in their places, where they had been for three quarters of a 
century. Otherwise, all was empty and swept out ; for Miss 
Ammah always cleared up as she went, and she had had women 
cleaning there within an hour after the final departure. The 


PLANS, A PLOT, AND A PLEADING. 


241 


better rooms had hardly been used for years ; these last Gilleys 
had bivouacked in the shed portion, and that was all to be 
taken down. Miss Ammah meant to have mechanics there at 
once, to do all that could be well done before winter, so as to 
close it safely, and leave it in the nearest possible readiness for 
what she would do by and by. It was about these things she 
wanted to consult Rael. 

France also ; “You must come and tell me about colors and 
finishings,” she said. “ Things might as well be pretty, when 
they ’ve got to be something ; especially, when you don’t believe 
in rooting up every five years to make over in some last sort of 
prettiness. I ’ve got a real handsome old foundation. Those 
Gilleys have been living anyhow ; but the house was built by 
people who lived somehow.” 

So it was. It was not large, but it had an expression of 
largeness; the hallway ran straight through, and so did the 
morning or the afternoon sun when east or west doors were 
opened ; the stair sloped leisurely up along one whole side ; the 
rooms were low, square, heavily raftered, plentifully windowed ; 
there was a kind of broad, pleasant proportion in them that 
struck the feeling at once. Everything was solid, enduring : 
mere surface neglect or misuse could not spoil that ; these were 
easily obliterated and replaced with improvement. 

Wall-papers were queer enough, soiled enough, tattered 
enough ; but the high wainscots, with their grooved and fluted 
cornices, were of real old hardwoods, and around the ceilings 
ran beautiful quaint mouldings in high fret-bars and billets and 
corbels ; all plain, simple, and heavy, belonging to the far-back 
time when people did things simply, but put into them such 
ampleness and genuineness of material, such patience of time 
and labor, as made them rich. No wear or defacement had 
reached these adornments in all the years that they had been 
so incongruous with the shifty, scrambling, fugacious living 
below. France and Miss Ammah looked at them with de- 
light. 

“ Why, it ’s all done ! ” said France. 

“ Fifty years ago,” said Miss Ammah, “ it was fine to get 
rid of all these beams and corner-posts and to have flat surfaces 

16 


242 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


and smooth plaster finish. Now people are tearing down their 
plaster and filling their rooms up with timbers that had nothing 
to do wdth the original building. Just as they pretend with 
gas-logs for wood fires, and set up spinning-wheels in the 
corners when they don’t know a flyer from a distaff, or whether 
they ’ve all the pieces that belong or not.” 

“ If I were going to build a house, though, Miss Ammah, I 
w’ould build it like this,” said France. 

“You would!” said Miss Ammah, and looked pleased. “ I 
don’t know that I would, though,” she added. “ I think it ’s 
good to be true to one’s times. When people built like this 
they had plenty of timber, and not plenty of ways and works 
such as we have got since. Now we have the works and ways, 
and not the timber. It ’s an extravagant luxury, merely, if you 
put it in. So I ’m not sure about the business we have with it.” 

“You must be glad this has happened so at any rate,” said 
France ; and then they went to the plans and the colors. 

There was a little southwest chamber, all sunshine, that 
France said should be painted in pale, cool blue, and have one 
of those lovely new blue-checked mattings on the floor. Then 
there was another in a north angle that should be in delicious 
buff, with a thread-line of vermilion “to ma^e sunshine.” The 
dark. “ real ” woods in the large rooms should be cleansed and 
polished only, of course. 

Between two of the chief apartments on the south side was 
an included platform or roofed portico, upon which a door at 
either end opened. This Miss Ammah said she would have in- 
closed with glass and made warm for plants, and for a pleasant 
connecting gallery to sit in in the winter. From this one 
looked straight across the Heybrook slopes to the grand height 
of Thumble. The Gilley house stood upon a ledge, higher yet 
than those intervening uplands. 

To the west, where the hall door opened, all those lovely hill 
outlines swept and rolled away, with the soft haze of the great 
river valley veiling the mountain swells beyond. It was the 
beauty of Heybrook hillside, widened. 

“ I should like to see this in the winter, with the snow,” said 
France, standing there with Rael Heybrook beside her, “and 


PLANS, A PLOT, AND A PLEADING. 243 

your plants in the little glass gallery. Why, Miss Ammah ! ” 
she exclaimed with sudden inference that had not struck her 
before, “do you really mean ever to be here in the winter?” 

“ Somebody will, after I ’ve set the house going,” said Miss 
Ammah, “ and I shall know it is here. I like to know there 
is a place away from hotels and visitings. I never had one 
before.” 

“ I wish I were as old as you are. Miss Ammah,” said France. 

“ That ’s wishing me comfortably under the daisies,” returned 
the elder lady. 

“ No. I might wish to change places with you. I should 
like to be able to choose my place, as you can.” 

“ Maybe I should like to choose my place, as you can,” said 
Miss Ammah. “ No, France Everidge, we should n’t either of 
us like it. You, and I too, would rather do our own going 
without than anybody else’s having.” 

France stood still and silent. The sun was striking level 
now. It shone rosy upon her, and in at the doorway behind, 
lighting up the old pleasant hall. It shone upon Rael Hey- 
brook too ; it seemed suddenly to light them up to each other. 
Miss Ammah was below in the shadow of a maple-tree that, 
itself all tipped with fire by the first ripeness of autumn, filled 
the right-hand comer of the dooryard. 

“ I suppose Mr. Kingsworth would say,” said Kael, “ that we 
could n’t go without, without having had in some sense already.” 

“ Why don’t you say it yourself, Mr. Rael ? ” France asked, 
turning to him quickly. She meant why did n’t he assume 
his own perception, instead of attributing it to one who he 
fancied might more properly assume. 

Israel answered her almost as quickly. “ I do say it ! ” and 
he looked down at her from his fine height as she lifted her 
eyes toward him. “I do say that I would rather go without 
the best that has ever come to me to know of than never to have 
known anything about it.” 

He might mean a score of things, — opportunity, knowledge, 
life among men of knowledge, a breadth of action that he could 
plan or imagine ; perhaps he thought he did mean them all. 

But the sunlight, like the truth, shot them through and 


244 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


through. Something warmed at both their hearts, though each 
but felt it for each self, and only saw the other standing in the 
splendor. 

Coming down, they met Bernard Kingsworth at the foot of 
the hill, where they struck out upon the roadway. He was 
going down to the farm. They paired for the remainder of the 
walk, — Mr. Kingsworth with France, Miss Ammah with Israel. 
Miss Ammah had been very shy of any tHe-h-tUe with Bernard 
all the week ; it was very much as if she were afraid of an offer 
to herself. She was afraid of being appealed to ; she thought 
the next step on Bernard Kingsworth’s part would very likely 
be to say something to her. She had kept close to France when 
France was by ; she had chaperoned herself so effectually that 
she had quite effectually defended the girl also. 

They were in the valley now, the comparative valley between 
these high tops of two of the multitudinous hills ; the light was 
dimming, and that quick chill was falling that does drop so 
instantly below the heights. 

France was pale ; she was tired with her long walk. Mr. 
Kingsworth offered her his arm. No, she thanked him ; her 
stick was a good help. 

Rael had cut the stick for her to come down the hill with. 
She had refused his arm also. She would take nobody’s arm. 

Sarell, just returned, met them in the dooryard ; it was past 
the tea time, all was I’eady on the table, and Sarell said a word 
privately to France as they passed in at the porch way. France 
said it again to Miss Ammah upstairs, and they huiTied in, tak- 
ing off their hats. 

Mr. Kingsworth sat by at the tea-drinking ; he had had his 
own early, at the parsonage. He had supposed he was coming 
for an early evening call. 

They managed the meal speedily ; it was so pleasant on the 
piazza, the after-light was coming on, and the two ladies had 
had that transmitted little word. 

But Miss Ammah was left alone with the minister this time. 
France slipped away into the kitchen, and Miss Ammah, after 
that whisper, had not a word to say in her hindrance. 

Mrs. Heybrook was in her bedroom. 


PLANS, A PLOT, AND A PLEADING. 


245 


So France was there with Sarell when Rael came in with the 
milk-pails. Sarell was putting the last clean cups on the tray. 
She had been very quick with the dish-washing. Perhaps one 
reason for that appeared in a couple of damp towels that France, 
sitting by the corner of the table, had not yet laid out of her 
hands. She hung them on a low rack at the table end as Rael 
entered. 

“ Don’t lisp it,” Sarell had just said in a whisper. “ It ’s too 
bad, cornin’ right on top o’ the other, but I must ; I ’ll be back 
’fore she knows it in the mornin’. An’ the bread c’n wait. 
You sh’ll hev cream-biscuit fr breakfuss, an’ there ’ll be a biled 
brown loaf f ’r dinner. ’T ain’t anything ’t I c’n help, y’ see. 
Time an’ tide an’ babies waits f ’r nobody’s lezhure. Slim chance 
f ’i’ era ’f the’ did.” 

“ Has mother come home 1 ” asked Rael, going through. 

“ Yiss, she hez,” Sarell whispered at him in a forcible manner, 
with a side-reach toward him over her shoulder as she wrung 
her dishcloth. “ She ’s come home wdth a headache, an’ I ’ve 
mode her go to bed ; an’ the smarter she ’s let alone, the smarter 
she ’ll git up in the mornin’. You ’d as good ’s keep out o’ the 
kitchen, ef y’ can, an’ keep th’ rest out.” 

Rael passed on quietly into the buttery with his milk ; they 
heard him pour it softly into the pans. Sarell slipped up the 
shed- way stairs to her own chamber. France sat'still in the still 
kitchen. The girl came dowm in a minute with shawl and straw 
hat on and went quickly out the back way. Her sister lived 
half a mile off, across the hills; and a little soul, not waiting for 
anybody’s leisure, was coming into the world to-night. * She 
forgot the milk-pails that wanted scalding. Rael had set them 
down so gently that there was no clatter to remind her ; then 
he had gone away again toward the barns. 

France made sure of that ; then she lifted a tin kettle of hot 
water from the stove, and went round into the buttery. She 
scalded the pails, rubbed them bright with a clean towel she 
found there, and set them ready for the morning milking. 

A certain odd delight touched her, doing this homely work, 
as if she had been a sister in the house. “ How pleasantly 
these farm-people help one another, and take the work up 
from each other’s hands ! ” she thought. “ It seems as if 


246 ODD, OR EVEN'? 

their life together must mean more than ours does, sitting in 
our drawing-rooms.” 

She had left Mr. Kingsworth and Miss Ammah together a 
good while. Perhaps she had been partly not unwilling, for 
that very reason, to make herself helpful to-night to Sarell. 
Most people have their moods. France certainly had hers. 

Perhaps Mr. Kingsworth’s being there may have been partly 
a reason, also, why Rael went off into the barns again. The 
minister was his friend, but he wanted to think things over just 
now that he was not quite ready to talk of. 

Mr. Hey brook and Lyman were out by the north-lot fence, 
talking about to-morrow’s work. Rael said something to them 
as he went by. France found herself left quite alone, — the 
“ men-folks ” not gathering, as they were wont to do, in the 
broad shed-stoop. Something new came into her head. 

“What is the nse of waiting till it happens, and then not 
being let 1 ” she said. “ I ’ll do it once, any way. 1 ’ll take 
what Mr. Rael calls the ‘ advantage.’ ” 

The yeast-jug was in the buttery by the cool window ; she 
knew the way to the flour-barrel ; the bread-pan was in the 
pantry. She had watched Mrs. Hey brook at her mixing a 
dozen times. She gathered all in the outer room, she turned 
her muslin sleeves up to the shoulders, and pinned them there. 
In five minutes she was rolling and coaxing, with some distant 
respect certainly, lest she should get deeper in than seemed 
nice to her, a mass of clean, soft dough upon the moulding- 
board. She touched her hands softly to the sifted flour, she 
took* a pretty way of her own with the working, she beckoned 
with her finger-tips, she rolled lightly off with bended wrists, 
she rounded up again with rounded palms, she grew bold and 
intimate in her touch only as she found out her control, and 
that the globe she was shaping grew coherent with itself, and 
she could keep dry out of chaos. She felt a splendid power 
and independence all at once. It was a grand thing to make 
bread. That was what always broke down at home when the 
cook went. 

Bread and butter ! What queens these country house-wives 
were, with their pure, sweet churnings and their delicate 
bakings ! 


PLANS, A PLOT, AND A PLEADING. 


247 


Her spirit and enterprise rose audaciously. Already a per- 
fectly intrepid notion seized her. It drove out of her head 
what she had been thinking while she wiped up the dishes. 

About Bernard Kingsworth, and why she was not always 
more glad to see him ; why some curious little difference in 
him the last few times they had met had wrought a difference 
in her that she could not help, and made her seem again, 
and more than ever, to hold him in two quite separate places 
in her mind, the one becoming almost antagonistic to the other. 
Why, with all his uplifting and that touch of his thought that 
kindled hers so swiftly into enthusiasm, with all she knew of 
his good and noble life here, with all that the height of her 
caught and reflected, as the hill-tops caught the sunlight, she 
was more comfortable to have it all come, as the sunlight 
comes, through a certain atmosphere of distance, and without 
reminder that there was anything else but that pure, ineffable 
outshining in his whole being and existence. Why was she 
fancifully impatient of that black coat of his, and the very tie 
of his cravat, and of noticing the cut of his shoes and the little 
rim of dust that gathered on them in his long walk over the 
hill down here to see them 1 

Why, — a sudden recollection of him sitting out there with 
Miss Ammah brought the whys all up again, and mixed them 
with her bread-mixing now, notwithstanding her fine, bold plan 
that had just scattered them, — why were not the little per- 
sonalities about him, — the personalities of a gentleman, — why 
were not the ways of his speech and movement, instinct always 
with the sincerity and strength and nobleness that she felt sure 
of in him, so interesting to her as — for instance — Rael Hey- 
brook’s plain, bravely-worn working-dress, his honest word, a 
little reserved with proud humility, his delicate tact and ready 
courage, his quiet waiting and patience and self- training, his 
manly upreaching in the midst of common toil, forced her to 
acknowledge them to be 1 

She would not come nearer home than that. She would not 
ask why she had sung in the boat with Rael, when she had only 
felt that shadow of a calm protection, that. thrill of the spirit 
rather than of a girl’s heart, as she stood by Bernard Kings- 


248 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


worth under the coming storm, or sat by his side in the little 
tent among the birches and cedars. 

She set one off against the other ; she put one in the other’s 
place, and asked herself questions. 

Those subtile delicacies that she had known the young far- 
mer show, would n’t Mr. Kingsworth have shown them too ? 
Would n’t he have helped her down from the mowing-machine, 
and walked up the hill with her, that day, ignoring the prank 
of it and her torn gown 1 Certainly, he was a gentleman bred. 
But here was a gentleman born. To be born and bred among 
gentlefolks unfortunately takes away the chance of proving 
this so conspicuously. She settled that point that way. 

And then, for bravery. Suppose Mr. Kingsworth had been 
driving her down those ledges when the polestrap broke 1 He 
would have behaved well. She had no idea that he was a 
physical any more than a moral coward. He had faced light- 
ning serenely ; but she could not exactly imagine him flinging 
himself down into the melee of hoofs and wheels, as Rael had 
done. He would have gone to the bottom of tbe hill with her 
probably, and met fate like a Christian. Well? Yes, that 
would be splendid, in its way, too, but she liked Rael’s way. 

Liked ? Something touched her sharply at that word. Nev- 
ertheless, her thought hurried itself on. 

Mr. Kingsworth would be uncorrupt in his integrity, that 
was beyond the saying. In such a matter as that bargain, now, 
he would be as fair as daylight, as fair as Rael. Well ? Why 
could n’t she care so very much about it, if he would ? 

Care ? Then she argued deliberately. 

“ I suppose it must be because it is all of course with a 
clergyman. You expect him to be up. I don’t suppose an 
angel would make me feel as an angel-like mortal would. 
Climbing is always finer than being on the top, one knows not 
how. It is like the people in social places earned or made for 
them somehow beforehand, compared with the middle ones that 
are doing the things that are making the places for by and by. I 
suppose nothing ever is at the very topmost ; but if it pretends 
to be, you despise it ; and if you fancy it is, it does n’t seem 
to take hold of you anywhere. It is the very reason of the 


PLANS, A PLOT, AND A PLEADING. 


249 


‘ coming down into the midst ’ that he told us about the other 
day. The Lord Himself had to come down into the middle, 
between His own self and us, or we should never have found 
our way — ” 

That was where she stopped thinking altogether. She found 
herself where it hardly seemed lawful to be. 

So she punched her finger into her bread-ball, now, as she 
had seen Mrs. Heybrook do, and it made a clean drill-hole j and 
she knew that the kneading was done. She covered it up with 
a large cloth, fresh from the line, gathered her things tidily 
together and left them so, slid off through the house and up- 
stairs, washed her hands, turned down her sleeves, came down 
and out at the front door, and went after Lyman. “ It ’s a 
good thing I ’ve got my feet again,” she said. 

But when she found Lyman up by the turkey-coops, she was 
glad to sit down on a rock that sloped out from the old garden 
wall. 

“ I ’ve got a plot, Lyman,” she said, “ and you ’re in it.” 

“ Give me my latitude and longitude, then,” said Lyman, 
putting one knee up on the low stones near her, and sitting 
sidewise upon them. 

“ The long and short of it, that is,” said France. “ Well ; 
there is a long and a broad. It ’s serious, and it ’s good fun. 
The serious part is, your mother ’s tired out ; and if we don’t 
make a chance for her to be sick in, if she wants to, she ’ll be 
sick without any chance at all.” 

“ I ’ve seen it,’’ said Lyme ; and his voice had the longitude 
in it ; the almost invariable fun was quite dropped out. 

“ It would worry and disappoint her if we were to go away ; 
arid besides that, she has nursed us both, and now it ’s our turn. 
To-morrow is butter-day.” 

“ By George, it is ! And father and I had laid out to go and 
cut that bass-wood, and get it to the saw-mill, so as to have it 
drying out for the finish of the new shed-chamber we’re going 
to fix up next spring.” 

“ Could you get up at three o’clock in the morning?” 

“ I reckon. Why ? ” 

“ Because I could. And because I can work butter. I ’vo 


250 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


done it, a little, for fun, and now I want to do the whole of it, 
in earnest. I ’d like to know, and to establish the self-evidence, 
that I ’m equal to the responsibility of bread and butter. If 
you’ll bring the things somewhere where it won’t wake them 
all up, and if you ’ll help churn, I ’ll have the butter all 
lumped out before Sarell gets round in the morning. And I ’ve 
thought what a nice place that new corn-barn would be for my 
dairy. See ? ” 

Lyman could n’t see very much, of her face, for instance, 
literally ; for the dusk had deepened ; but he looked at her as 
if he would see what this new turn and aspect made of her. 
There was a neat, lively, decided little poise to her head and 
neck ; he could discern that. 

I should n’t wonder if you ’d put it through,” he said, with 
his balanced slowness. “ Do you know how many things you 
want for a dairy 1 It ’s considerable of a move.” 

“ I know. It ’s real good of you, Lyme ; there ’ll be the 
churn, with the cream in it, and the pail of water, and the ice, 
and the wooden bowl and the butter-spats, and a table or a 
board or something, I suppose. Oh, and some salt, and a spoon- 
ful of sugar. But I’ll see to that. Yes; it is really good of 
you.” She emulated his own slowness and tranquillity. 

“ Present, indicative, hey 1 well, perhaps I ’d as good go and 
make it so ; or else it ’ll have to be two o’clock in the room of 
three. How ’ll you get up and out, without stirring anybody 1 
Mother sleeps light toward mornin’.” 

“ I ’m coming down by the roof and the maple-tree and the 
piazza-rail. Now, if you ever tell anybody !” 

“ I should n’t let on,” said Lyme gravely. “ I ’ve got to 
creep down the long back roof from the attic, myself. If*l 
should slip, would n’t they think it was thunder ! ” 

“ Lyman, if you do slip, I ’ll never forgive you ! ” 

She got up at that and moved toward the house. It was 
quite time to show herself, at least, to Miss Ammah and the 
minister. She met Mr. Kingsworth coming up across the grass- 
plot. She gave him her hand. 

“ I ’ve been busy,” she said. “ There were things I had to 
do. And I ’ve been talking with Lyman ; that was business 


PLANS, A PLOT, AND A PLEADING. 251 

too. I meant to have come out ; but you and Miss Ammah, I 
suppose, — ” 

“Were busy also,” said the minister. “Yes. The evening 
is very lovely ; would you mind a little turn up the hill here, 
now, while I tell you what we were talking of? ” He had turned 
to walk down with her, but he paused a little as he spoke, and 
stood beside her in the clear moonlight that was brilliant now, 
nearing close upon the full. 

“Hadn’t we better go back to Miss Ammah?” France 
asked, with an apprehension. 

“ I would like to say it to yourself,” said Bernard Kingsworth. 

“ 1 don’t think I had better walk any more now,” said 
France. “ I am a little tired.” 

“ I ought to have remembered it ! Of course you are doing 
too much ! ” And he came close to her with an offered arm. 
She could not help taking it, then ; they walked up to the 
piazza-end. 

Miss Ammah was nowhere to be seen. She had said good- 
night to the minister, and had gone upstairs. Mr. Kingsworth 
perceived that it was hardly a time to keep the girl. “ May I 
come to-morrow ? ” he asked. 

France was silent just long enough for silence to be conscious. 
“ I would like to say it to yourself,” and “ may I come to-mor- 
row ? ” were phrases and a position that she could not be 
silly enough to misunderstand. Yet she could assume nothing, 
even to refuse it. Poor France ! It was her first time. It had 
come upon her all of a sudden. Just after all that thinking 
and comparison, too. Was this what they had been premoni- 
tory of? She felt hot and frightened. She wished she could 
run away to her mother. 

“ I suppose so. I beg your pardon. I do not know what to 
say,” she said. 

She stood at the upper of the two steps, in the deep shade of 
a maple-tree. Mr. Kingsworth had paused ; he looked up at 
her from just below, as he waited on the grass-sward. He could 
not see her face quite plainly now ; yet he looked up, and knew 
that she was looking down. He held his hat in his hand, and 
stood bareheaded before her while she answered him. Then, 
when those hesit.ating words came, lie stepped quickly nearer. 


252 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


“ It is not fair that you should have to speak at all,” he 
said. “ I will come to-morrow ; then, if you like, you can send 
me away.” 

Every word told the story, quite clearly, beforehand. 

“ Good-night.” He held out his hand. 

“Stop, Mr. Kingsworth! I must say something. It would 
be better for me to make a silly mistake than to let you make 
a — painful one. If this is — can possibly be — a question — 
between you and me — ” 

Of course, he could not let her force herself to anticipate him. 
Her words, too, began to tell the story, more instantly than he 
could beai’, on her side. He must plead a little now. 

“ It is a question from me to you,” he said. “ The question of 
my life.” 

“ Dear Mr. Kingsworth, don’t think so ! Don’t ask it ! ” 

“Don’t answer it. Miss France, quite yet. Wait — let me 
wait. Ask yourself — ” 

France did it all. She waited'; she let him wait ; she asked 
herself. She did it in the breathing-time of half a dozen 
breaths ; rather, it was done within her, or before her mental 
vision. It was all clear now. Why, — yes, all those whys that 
had been haunting her, conflicting with her true, high estimate 
of this man ; as regarded him, all things suddenly took their cer- 
tain place and relation. Her tenderest veneration of him re- 
turned ; the little, ridiculous distastes vanished ; he stood 
before her, asking what she was not worthy to bestow — what 
she had not in her to bestow. That was the perplexity, the 
hindrance, between them that must be put away. 

One has seen a great landscape that one did not know was 
there suddenly declare itself in sharp delineation under a light- 
ning flash in a space that had been void and black, whose 
range one could not even have calculated, an instant before. 
It was in such a way that all the possibilities of her life seemed 
instantly to take shape before France, in the showing of this 
vital question that was flashed upon them ; and in them all she 
could not anywhere behold herself as belonging, in this wise, to 
Bernard Kingsworth. She did not belong to him. It was his 
mistake. 


PLANS, A PLOT, AND A PLEADING. 


253 


Into this momentary mirage she did not look to see what else 
might be. These phantasmas are but given for an instant to 
the searching and answering of a single demand. They meet 
that absolutely ; then they close and vanish again, and we walk 
on in all other concernings as if w'e had not seen. 

As France saw, she spoke ; as if she had seen and pondered 
a long while, and the words had been all ready, and not an 
answer to a great surprise. 

“ I am so sui’e of my own mind, Mr. Kingswortb,” she said 
slowly, too epnest to be shy ; and then, perceiving, as suddenly 
as she had all the. rest, how considered her assertion might ap- 
pear, “ Things come certain in a moment,” she went on, still 
with the quietness of clear-seeing and truth-telling, and the 
strength of a wonderful forward move of her woman’s life in her 
in those six breaths. “ This does, that I could not have thought 
of, and that never happened to me before. I am not fit for it ; 
it is a great deal more than ought to come to me ; that is why 
I cannot take it.” 

Beraard Kingsworth mistook. “ You can’t expect me to be 
satisfied with that,” he said. “ I, who know myself, and who 
see you as you do not see yourself. You can’t expect me even 
to consider such a word as that. It is I who ask, who want to 
take a great gift. I am not ‘ offering myself,’ ” he went on rap- 
idly, with something of a light play on a phrase he quoted scorn- 
fully, “I am beseeching yourself — of you.” 

“ I have not myself to give. I mean,” she hurried, “ that if 
I could give, I shoidd know that it was given already ; and I 
know that it is not. 0 Mr. Kingsworth ! I am only a half- 
grown girl, and you are — I am ashamed ! Don’t think I don’t 
know how far you are beyond me ! ” 

“ Only in this one thing,” he said sadly, “ that I cannot bring 
you beside me in. Let it all be. I may come another time, as 
I have cornel” 

France did not answer a word to that. What could she say 1 
While she wondered, her time was gone. He would not press 
her silence ; it was too nearly an answer in itself. 

He put forth his hand to her again. She gave him hers, 
meeting his movement with a kindness that she could not help. 


254 ODD, OR EVEN V 

— that he could hardly, either, misunderstand. “ Good-night,’* 
she said. 

Compunction, gratitude, a great respect, were in her tone ; a 
wistful clinging to a valued friendship, but not a whit of 
woman’s love. Pained and embarrassed as she had been, her 
hand did not tremble ; it gave itself frankly, heartily, but with a 
controlled reserve. His did not tremble either ; but it clasped 
hers, and held it clasped an instant with a mute language. It 
was hard to let go, with that hand-clasp, all hold upon a possi- 
ble hope ; and yet France’s fingers were so quietly, calmly 
withdrawing. 

In that instant Israel Heybrook came out from the comer 
door in the house-angle upon the piazza behind, perceived the 
two figures standing there so, and retreated. 

France heard. A quick half-turn of her head showed her 
who it was, just as he was gone again. 

If he were not gone, there was no explaining. 

Was there any explaining to Bernard Kingsworth of the start 
and thrill that changed her gentle withdrawing into a palpable 
recoil, and the release of the hand he held almost into some- 
thing suddenly resentful 1 

There had hardly been need of greatly disconcerted shyness. 
She had but been saying in reality, as it might have seemed to 
anybody, the frankest, simplest good-night. 

It was not shyness. It was a positive shock, in which her 
calm, careful kindness turned to some conscious dismay ; a 
swift, absolute revulsion from the reality thgit had been between 
them. 

It was the electric apprehension of but a point of time ; it 
could hardly be recalled clearly to be judged of Yet Bernard 
Kingsworth had to think over and over long after what it might 
have meant. 

For France, there remained one single question. She scarcely 
knew how Mr. Kingsworth left her. The question was. What 
would Rael Heybrook think 1 

She had enough now to make her short night wakeful, beside 
her dairy plot and her three o’clock uprising. 

And there was to be rather more in that also for her than 
slic foresaw. 


DAY-DAWN IN THE DAIRY. 


255 


CHAPTER XXIV. 

DAY-DAWN IN THE DAIRY. 

After an hour or two of restlessness, and struggle with up- 
leaping flashes of memory and suggestion that smote across her 
momentary quietings like candle-flames across closed eyes, the 
light came to France that composed her. How absurd she had 
been ! Of course he would see, as the days went on. It could 
only be for to-night, to-morrow, that he would misunderstand. 
It would be quite plain to him, knowing what he must know, 
that it had ended as it had. Any otherwise, there would be 
more, of course — an open fact. He would see that it had 
stopped there where it had begun. 

From twelve to three she slept tranquilly. The old clock in ' 
the dining-room roused her with its whirr before the hour. Al- 
most in the three minutes’ grace before the striking she was 
ready, — her hair tossed into a large net, her warm woollen 
wrapper on, with a fresh calico gabrielle buttoned and belted over 
it, her feet safely dressed and protected. She crept out over the 
shingles from the window close opposite the maple-tree. She let 
herself down like a kitten, with a soft, light drop from the low- 
ermost branch to the ground, meeting it with a touch as if feet 
and earth were alike elastic. She ran to the clear little brook-pool 
among the elders just below the knoll, and made a delicious face 
and hand bath in the cold, bright water. 

The air was trembling out of stillness with the first low- 
stirring notes of little birds. Away down in the woods, the 
ceaseless soft crush of the waterfalls kept up its gentle diapase. 

The mystery of night was upon everything, tenderly and won- 
derfully ; the greater, dearer mystery of day was being bom again 
underneath the far eastern sky, — only a pale shadow of light, as 
it were, dividing itself from the moonlight that was still splendid 


256 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


in the west; both together they made just a soft visibleness 
that would be growing, not waning, as the moon would be melt- 
ing herself to a mist-shape of her own round shining. 

France felt the rare, subtile, buoyant charm of the hour. Life 
itself took a new outset. Yesterday’s old story was done with. 

“ The world begins over again every day,” she said. 

Lyman met her, as she walked up over the dew-fresh turf, 
holding her skirts from the wetness of the grass, whose second 
growth was pushing well. 

In the new corn-barn, with its wide-open door and its smell 
of clean pine, all was dry and comfortable and ready. Lyman 
had been churning. He helped her up the long step, and 
France sat down on the sill, her feet in the moonlight. 

“ I should like to sing,” she said. 

“ Well, do,” said Lyman. 

“ No, I ’ve got over it,” she answered. There were two moods 
in her this morning, after all. 

Perhaps she remembered that there were two different morn- 
ings that she knew of to-day, marked by the sun-tide that was 
rising over these Fellaiden hills. How many more, as sepa- 
rate and uncbncordant, on the round earth as the same light 
swept over it she could not know, and the thought made her 
shiver suddenly. 

“ I ’ll churn,” she said. “ I ’m cold — a little.” Then she 
grew warm with her work, and the motive and ambition of it, 
and the morning turned lovely again. 

“ Why, it begins to swish already ! ” she cried, and stopped 
to open the square little trap in the churn, “Yes; there are 
crumbs of butter, truly, on the lid. It is n’t much work. What 
shall we do with all our morning when it ’s done 1 ” 

“Eat our breakfast, I guess. You’ll be hungry enough not 
to wait for Miss Ammah. Do you mean to get up like this 
every butter-day 1 ” 

“ Not if they ’ll let me have my own way when I do get 
up. Otherwise, they ’ll know what to expect. There, if you ’re 
rested, you may crank a little now.” 

“ It is crank where you are,” said Lyman, with his boy free- 
dom. 


DAY-DAWN IN THE DAIRY. 257 

“ What does ‘ crank ’ mean, in that application of it 1 ” asked 
France. “ I don’t carry my Webster in my pocket.” 

“ Lively, chirk, chipper, chirp, chirruppy, cheery, jolly,” he 
ti*anslated. 

“ Thank you. You ’re a thesaurus.” 

“ Sounds as if I was. What is it 1 ” 

“ A treasury — everything, all you want, and all that belongs 
to it under the sun.” 

“ That ’s me, about as near as you could get to it. You ’re 
smart. Takes common folks a sight of a while to find out 
smartness. This butter ’s come ; some people would have 
churned it all away again. Takes smartness to know where 
, to stop. See here, clean an’ good an’ hard ; no froth, no 
bust.” 

“ Oh, what is ‘ bust ’ 1 Shall we ever get through our defini- 
tions 1 ” 

“ Bust is when you scatter it ; go at it too smart and fast, you 
know. Comes quick, and don’t fairly come at all. Here you 
are ! ” 

And the rich, clinging masses were out in the big wooden 
bowl. 

“ How sweet it smells ! How pretty it is to do ! ” said France, 
working hard with her spaddle, and pressing out the butter- 
milk dew till it ran down in clear, thin streams. 

“ We must have some to drink,” she said. “ Where ’s a cup, 
or something?” 

Lyman had brought a tumbler. He filled it from the churn, 
and France drank it foaming. “ What fun it is to live on a. 
farm ! ” she said. 

“ Should you like it always ? ” asked the boy, as if by asking 
he could keep her. 

She could answer the boy’s asking. She did not even think 
how different it would have been if he were a man. 

“ I like it better than any living I ever had before,” she 
said, impetuously. “ Living is all covered up in the city, as the 
piece of the real world is that the city is built on. And then 
people have to go back to it in books and pictures and poetry, 
and theories and abstractions and sciences, instead of things. 

17 


258 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


What ’s the reason the facts have to be all in one place, and 
the thoughts in another 1 People have to huddle so ! It ’s only 
creation that can take all the room it wants. You’re princes 
up here,” she talked on, tossing her butter, with strong, cheer- 
ful spats for emphasis. “ These are the parks and beautiful es- 
tates ; the cities are crowds of alley-ways, and the suburbs are 
dooryards ! Live here 1 Would I be a queen without the 
bother of it 1 Why, Rael — ” 

What elf of the air popped the wrong name between her lips, 
a name she never used ungarnished, as she chattered onl 
And what stopped her so absolutely at the sound of it 1 And 
what shadow came across the early daylight in the open door- 
way, just as she did stop 1 

Israel Hey brook stood there. Had he heard itl 

He had heard her say “Would I be a queen?” in quick 
reply to her own emphatic “ Live here 1 ” whose very tone had 
already answered itself. He put it with what he had seen the 
night before ; and he thought the little ardent speech was the 
brimming over of the girl’s secret gladness in what she knew 
was to be. He heard his name, indeed ; but how should he 
notice that ? It was but the careless substitution of the one 
name for the other, both of which stood to her, indifferently, as 
those of the farmer’s boys. 

Well, had he ever dreamed of anything else? He knew he 
had by the throb that started in him when that home name, 
without the “ Mr.,” broke, in that happy accent, from her lips. 

But Rael Heybrook cobid bear things. He was not a baby, 
to run away and cry. He had seen something, far off, and yet 
near enough to bless him, — and it is to be thought of, how, in 
two separate languages, “to wound” and “to beatify” have 
the same word to say them, — which would never, in the different 
man it might make of him, depart out of his life. His man- 
hood had recognized womanhood : that is the blessing and the 
W'ounding, between the one and the other ; it is the blow and 
the embrace with which the heavenly ennobles the earthly ; it 
is the divine accolade. 

Rael had waked and thought, some hours during that strange 
night ; he had roused, in the early dimness, to a strange day, 


DAY-DAWN IN THE DAIRY. 


259 


different fi*om all his other days; he had heard that thud of 
the churn, as he lay listening and thinking, near his window 
open into the still air. He had missed his brother from the 
opposite cot-bed in the large attic room ; and he had remem- 
bered with prompt self-reproach the need there was to antici- 
pate and lighten his mother’s cares. “ It ’s just like Lyme," 
he said ; and he hurried his own clothes on and came out to 
look for him, and see what on his own part he might do. 

But to find, France there, as his mother’s daughter might 
have been, and to hear those words : it made him wonder, 
somehow, what the Lord meant by it. Why must this all 
come here to happen, right close to him, and drawing his soul 
into itl 

And he stood there quietly and said, in his ordinary way, 
“So there are two of youl Miss France, I didn’t know you 
were a dairy-woman.” 

“ 0 Mr. Rael ! ” She had what they call a woman’s wile 
after all. She caught up her self-possession in an instant, and 
spoke with a pretty, hypocritical surprise. “ No ; I have just 
found it out myself. And I think to be a dairy-woman, in a 
morning like this, is to be an Eve in Paradise. Why didn’t 
you ever tell me of the mornings ? ” 

“ I thought you had seen them pretty often for yourself.” 

“Yes; at six o’clock. But the morning is all over then.” 
She laid her last smooth roll of butter into the bowl, spread 
the clean, wet cloth upon it, dropped the spats on the table, 
and came to the door. 

“ Look at those clouds, all pink and flame color! They were 
purple a little while ago, with bands of primrose sky between. 
Now, there is a great fire there ; see how deep it looks, as if 
half the east had melted and dropped in. That ’s where the 
phoenix story comes from, I know. See how the sun shoots up 
real, blazing wings I He ’s coming, coming I 0, look, -look ! 
He just leaps up, out of that hollow in the hills. And nothing 
can put him back again, one single second ! This day ’s begun, 
and it has got to be ! ” 

Perhaps France rushed with more abandon into her dawn- 
j)oetry, that she felt, on this first meeting with Rael Heybrook, 
after last night, she must rush into something. 


260 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


Then Rael blundered. When one tries to cover a conscious- 
ness with a commonplace, or to hide an underthought with a 
surface one, the thing underneath crops up through the slight- 
est word like a murder stain. “ I don’t winder you ’re happy, 
Miss France,” he said. “I mean, for this good work you’ve 
done for my mother.” 

It was not screening, so much as substitution of one real 
feeling for another; that made it worse, the feeling was so 
evident. Also, those two treacherous little syllables, “ I mean,” 
how they betrayed him with their explanation and apology ! 

The dawn was red on both their faces. The sun had leaped 
forth upon them with a vengeance. 

France only said, with her morning glee all dampened down, 
“ It was pleasant work to do, and pleasant to try to help her. 
I must go in now.” 

Lyman was putting the things together ; he was going to 
carry butter-bowl and churn into the house. Rael, standing 
outside, had to give his hand to France and help her down 
from the high door-sill. 

Then she walked away to the piazza, where the door stood 
open by which Rael had come out ; and Rael went round to 
the kitchen stoop to get his milk-pails. The cows would be 
down the lane early to-day. 

The day was begun, and it had got to be. Not a second of 
it could be put back. But it was one of the days that seem 
like a hard wedge in life, separating other days. 


IT MUST TAI£E CARE OF ITSELF. 


261 


CHAPTER XXV. 

IT MUST TAKE CARE OF ITSELF. 

Sarell came home ; she was in the kitchen when Israel car- 
ried in the milk-pails. In a little red farmhouse of three rooms, 
half a mile away along the green, rocky hill-flank, a wonderful 
joy had begun, and this was a day of genesis, a day of Eden. 
Yet it was the selfsame day that shone slowly, hardly, in its 
splendor, over the heads of these three, to whom its sun, as it 
tracked its swerveless course, measured spaces like the spaces 
of eternity. For these three had each seen into their own lives, 
into the asking and answering of them ; had caught, had be- 
lieved they caught, a quick, blinding revelation at once of 
what might be and what must be. And the two were whole 
firmaments apart. 

It was a sober day in the dwelling, because the good woman 
of the house, the good neighbor of the widely-scattered country- 
side, was “ too tired ” to come out of her room. “ Lazy,” she 
called herself ; and never even asked who churned and worked 
up the butter. She dozed and dozed, and did n’t care about 
any food, and just stayed still as she lay; as Miss Ammah had 
done the day the fever began with her. She would not have the 
doctor ; she persisted that she was not ill, only given out in her 
strength ; and, indeed, there was no access of heat and fever ; 
she w'as simply pale and prostrate. They tended her as well 
as she would permit them, and kindly let her be still. It was 
mother’s way, Rael said ; he had seen her so before. He did 
not think it was the fever. She had never had a fever in her 
life. 

In the afternoon Israel drove down to the lower village for 
the usual mail. Farmer Hey brook and Lyman were away in 
the upper wood-lot, cutting their basswood timber. Rael catne 


262 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


home with the letters ; one of them was for France, directed in 
the tall, strong lettering of Mr. Kingsworth’s handwriting. 
France colored scarlet when she took it from his hand. They 
all knew that handwriting so well. 

She had not expected this, at any rate. But how explain 
that she did not, that there was nothing to explain ; how ex- 
plain about her blushing, when nobody questioned, nobody 
noticed, apparently 1 Israel Heybrook, with his grave, quiet 
face, was just the same as always when he gave it to her ; and 
having delivered it, turned round and walked away. What 
was there for him to ask, or for her to say 1 

What did the minister mean by it? She was angry with the 
man for sending her this letter in the face of all the household, 
to whom she could account for nothing. She w'as angry with 
herself for caring so. She was provoked, most of all, that she 
had taken it, and stood there, conscious and coloring. Why 
had n’t she the presence of mind to lay it down on the table 
and leave it lying there, that he might see it was nothing to 
her ; that anybody might know she had the note ; that it 
might be about a book, or any common thing ; that any time 
would do to read it] But no; her evil genius had held her 
hands and her breath and sent that sudden, wretched pulse of 
hot blood all over her to tell tales, lying tales ! She had been 
helpless under it ; then she had run up stairs rapidly, as soon 
as Rael had turned his back, but had not passed out of hearing ; 
up stairs to her own room, where she flung the letter across the 
bed and it fell to the floor behind it, and she herself w'ent 
across to the farther roof-window, with a step that almost 
stamped, dropped down on her knees before the low sill, put 
her elbows on it and her cheeks in her two hands, and looked 
with fixed, furious eyes straight away into the farthest line 
of pale-blue, misty hills. 

It was a horrid day. What had the sun come up for at all, 
that morning she had thought so beautiful ] 

Miss Ammah was down in Mrs. Heybrook’s room with her 
knitting-work ; there was that one scrap of comfort, — that she 
could behave as she pleased alone up here this hour, and pro- 
voke no question. Question 1 Why did n't .Miss Ammah at 


IT MUST TAKE CABE OF ITSELF. 


263 


least ask something 1 She knew what the minister meant to 
ask, France supposed. Yet what good would that do, even ] 
She could not ask it out before them all. 

Would he keep coming, and writing, and not taking a “ No ” 
for an answer 1 She forgot all about his beautiful sermons, and 
his kindly, helpful talk, and the worth and dignity that were, 
she had known in her cool moments, so far above her own. She 
forgot to be thankful or pitiful. He had made her blush about 
him, he had made people think things : she could not forgive 
him. 

Down on the floor was that letter ; she remembered it after 
a while, and that she would have to open and read it, simply to 
know what to do next. To think of having to go abjectly after 
it, stooping, groping where she had flung it off ! That is the 
meanest thing about a high passion-flight ; you have to come 
down out of it, and pick up or smooth out, perhaps carefully 
and painfully restore, something you have maltreated, crushed, 
or tossed away. Well if it be nothing more precious or sen- 
tient than a bit of written paper ! 

We will not look while she goes down after it ; while she finds 
and opens and reads it. She must have done it ; but we will 
not curiously intrude. 

Bernard Kingsworth only wrote that he was going a day or 
two earlier than he had intended, to a ministerial exchange with 
a friend, pastor of his old Massachusetts parish, who needed the 
mountains for awhile. That it had been planned in the spring, 
long ago. He had called last night because of it; because he 
must go soon. He would not see them again for several weeks. 
Perhaps, when he returned in September, they would be gone. 

He had spoken because the time was short. That was what 
the note meant, without saying. If he had been listened to as 
he had hoped, there would have been a few days, perhaps a 
week, of happy interval. Perhaps other arrangements could 
have been made then, for this time, or some of it, that now he 
must spend away from Fellaiden. All this was clear in infer- 
ence ; but he did not say it. He only said, “ Good-by ” and 
“ God bless her.” 

She felt the generosity of it ; she was ashamed of her petu- 


264 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


lance, her wrathfulness. She had insulted this man, so grandly 
her superior, though he would never know it. She felt as if she 
had flung his forbearing note in his face. 

None the less she remembered how things would seem, all 
that long time. Nobody to contradict, nothing to show the 
mistake of, what people might have with reason guessed. That 
no other letter would come even, they might not know. There 
w’ere three of them to fetch the mails, as might happen, be' 
sides the morning fetching of the butcher or a neighbor coming 
back from the mill, and a letter from the same hand might not 
arrive by the same hand twice in a long time. He — she 
could not, in common sense, keep up “ people ” and plurals to 
herself all through her argument — he never would ask any 
other messenger what letters had come ! He, Israel Heybrook, 
who had seen the parting, and had brought back this, would 
go on thinking what he had thought. Well! She only hated 
to have people under misappi'ehensious. She never could play 
a joke for that very reason. She could not for one minute 
like to see anybody acting or feeling in a mistake. 

She was behaving like a goose in a story-book ! Why 
could n’t the simpletons speak out, and set things straight I 
That was what she asked always over those provoking fictitious 
complications. Why not walk up to Israel Heybroook now, 
the next time she came in his way, and say coolly, “ You in- 
feiTed something, I think, the other evening, — and since, — that 
was not true. I would rather you should know it is not ” 1 

Because, what could she suppose Israel Heybrook cared 
whether it were true or not 1 And how could she let him, nay, 
how could she let herself know that it was anything to her 
what he might imagine about it 1 

There was another way. She could drop the note, half un- 
folded as it lay now, upon her wool-basket. She could hand it 
to Miss Ammah out on the piazza there, when Rael might be 
bj'. She could say, “ I have had this note from Mr. Kings- 
worth. He is going away for awhile. I suppose we shall 
hardly see him any more.” 

All very well, if it had only waited to occur to her at the 
proper time, and so been genuine. She would not plan it be- 
forehand, be ungenuine for all Rael Heybrook’s — 


IT MUST TAKE CARE OF ITSELF. 


265 


What 1 

It could Tit have occurred to her. She sav’ that, also. There 
would have been an infinitesimal space of time between the 
suggestion and the act, which would have had just the con- 
scious purpose in it that all night and all day could have now, 
if with this forethought she waited for her opportunity till 
to-morrow afternoon. 

“ It must take care of itself,” she said, and went down stairs 
and set the tea-table. 

She took that upon her then and there. She was ready 
afterward in the kitchen, with the clean towels to which she 
had found her way, to wipe the dishes as Sarell washed. Then 
she said, “ I made the bread last night : it was good. Let me 
make it, please, every night, till Mrs. Heybrook gets rested 
again. You have enough to do, and I like it.” 

“You ’re a queer kind of a boarder,” Sarell answered, looking 
at her sharply with the blue twinkle of her shrewd eyes. 


266 


ODD, OK EViiN? 


CHAPTER XXVI, 

“NOT HALF GOOD ENOUGH.” 

Mrs. Heybrook did not get rested, neither did she grow more 
ill, for several weeks. It was a low, hidden, prolonged ailing ; 
rather the absence of asserted sickness than sickness itself, which 
might have run its course and turned to convalescence quicker. 
But “all that ever ailed her was a slow tire,” Mrs. Heybrook said. 
“ She had n’t the force left to be real sick with.” So they minis- 
tered to her, as only prostration would have persuaded her to 
let them minister, and waited for the force to come. 

“ That girl ain’t half a fool,’’ Sarell said of France, one day. 

“ Miss Everidge ! ” said Israel Heybrook, with unmistakable 
quick emphasis. 

“ Oh, yer need n’t put no blastin’ powder under yer words. 
I ain’t disrespectin’ her, not an atom. I ’d blow up fer her as 
fast as anybody, now, though I did n’t think sech gret things of 
her when she fust come, steppin’ round in her cambrics. But 
I tell you what it is, she shines out now ! It ’s the sense of it ! 
She don’t come ketchin’ holder things she don’ know how ; nor 
Stan’ roun’ starin’, sayin’, ‘ Can’t I do this, and can’t I do that,’ 
when ye ’r up to yer eyes, an’ want all yer elber-room, an’ she 
knows she can’t. She jest picks up a corner she can heft, an’ 
she don’t leggo on ’t. If it ’s done once, it ’s done every day. 
You c’n depend on it, an’ that ’s where the help comes in. You 
c’n count up the rest o’ y’r time clear. She ’s got one thing 
after another ont’ her end, till I tell you the teter ’s balanced 
pooty neah’n the middle ! ” 

Miss Tredgold turned things over in her mind. 

She did not ask France Everidge questions, just to draw forth 
in words what she could infer perfectly well without words. 


“ NOT HALF GOOD ENOUGH.” 267 

She was not a woman to whom life was only life when the facts 
of it troubled the atmosphere. 

France did not tell her anything. The open note was not 
handed over to her, as conveying any tidings of Mr. Kings- 
worth’s movements. He was Miss Ammah’s friend, and had 
spent that whole evening with her, first. Among other things, 
so France phrased it, he had himself, probably, mentioned to 
her his impending absence. Why should France parade the 
circumstance of his having written to her also 1 That, unfortu- 
nately, had paraded itself quite as much as she could placidly 
endure. 

So silence told a story, and the birds of the air, that are un- 
spoken swift perceptions, flew between them. Miss Ammah 
knew that the young girl had refused to listen to the minister. 

Miss Ammah knew, too, that Rael Heybrook was still “ giving 
way.” It was hard to tell from the grave, controlled demeanor 
of this youth, who had known nothing of the passion and excite- 
ment of life, nothing of the stage-and-novel demonstrations of 
human experience — to whom a feeling was something covered 
up in his own soul, and decorous bearing was like the quiet 
strength of his own great hills — what lay beneath his restraint, 
or whether his calm comings and goings were restraint at all. 

Had he given over, without fully taking to his consciousness, 
that which France Everidge’s presence had quickened him to 
feel a need of? or was there begun with him the long, deliberate 
foregoing of a lifetime that must be always aware of what it 
might — nay, ought to have had, but which should be owing 
till eternity should justify all debts of being and relation? 

Was not this owing to him, at least, and perhaps from her, 
that he should know his own conditions fairly, so that his word, 
his act, might shape and play fairly in them? This was the 
ought — the omng — that she turned over carefully and anx- 
iously in her mind. 

But Miss Ammah was not one of those over-helpful subordi> 
nates that must always be giving Providence adift. She thought, 
on general principles, that the straws she could see in the way 
might very possibly be small obstacles before the purpose that 
was marching on. It would be a foolhardy officiousness to 


268 ODD, OR EVEN ? 

try to pick a pin from the track before the wheels of a loco- 
motive. 

She believed in the need of things that happen, for the most 
part ; except they happen by craft of selfish intermeddling, or 
open-eyed wrongdoing. If there were a living truth between 
these two, that belonged to the eternities, it should have a 
force in itself that would find or break its way as it grew. She 
might as well interfere to guide one of these mountain brooks 
to the sea, as to cut a channel for a true human love, born in 
high places, and bound with an enlarging might toward the 
infinite deeps. 

For such a love as this, between natures that were not coarse 
or common, must be born in the high places if born at all. It 
would pi'ove itself by the overbearing that it would need to 
carry it past hindrance, delay, difference. If it were not this 
love, and did not prove itself so, then let it not be. It would 
have proved itself but that other poor thing instead, — a passing 
fancy, on the one part ; on the other, as she had reasoned be- 
fore, a mere foreshowing of some waiting reality. 

All this did not prevent Miss Ammah’s ponderings gravitating 
much toward the subject. Where the body is, thither will the 
thought-wings flutter and swoop. And of the thoughts of the 
heart the mouth speaks, though the intent of the will may 
drive speech by very roundabout turns. 

Had France absolutely and finally refused the minister'! 
That was w’hat she would very much have liked to know. Not 
the bald fact ; she hated curiosity, and things she had no real 
business with. But what mind France was in toward Bernard 
Kingsworth, what sort of place and estimate she held him in, 
what she would say of him, friendly-wise, or whether she would 
say anything of him at all, — these questions, the answer to 
which w'ould point like a weather-vane to the quarter out of 
Avhich the wind was blowing — moved Miss Ammah. The more, 
of course, that she remembered Mr. Everidge and the anxiety, 
which was a part of her own uneasy responsibility, with which 
he must be aw'aiting results. 

They moved her to say something one day when her morning 
letters had come in, and among them was one from Northampton; 


“NOT HALF GOOD ENOUGH. 


269 




to say it just as she would have done had there been no 
thought behind to make her scrupulous. She would never 
have deliberated, any more than France herself, pretext or 
opportunity ; but she suddenly resolved that she had at least 
a right to act naturally. 

“ This is from Mr. Kingsworth,” she said ; and she just flashed 
her eyes over her glasses at France, without raising her head. 

France did not raise her head, either. She was very busy 
with a dark-blue ribbon and some French marigolds that she 
was putting upon Sarell’s Sunday hat for a fine autumn trim- 
ming. 

But she was not so silly as not to speak at all. She settled 
a critical pin, and then she did look up, with quite a charm- 
ing, innocent openness. 

“ Mr. Kingsworth 1 Is he coming home pretty soon 1 ” 

“No; he is to give Mr. Dillon a fortnight longer. I thought 
you knew that. It was spoken of last Sunday.” 

“ I believe it was. Miss Ammah, don’t you think Mrs. Hey- 
brook ought to have some chicken jelly for her dinner 1 ” 

“And then Mr. Kingsworth thinks of going for a week, a 
minister’s week, one more Sunday and a fortnight of weekdays, 
to Schenectady, and up round then, by Montreal. Yes; Mrs. 
Heybrook must have the chicken jelly; I left some covered in a 
saucer on the cellarway shelf,” answered the categorical woman. 

Her categoricalness thwarted herself ; she could no longer 
avail herself of the simple, natural thing that she had a right 
to, and had begun with. She had to insist on her own subject, 
now ; and having made up her mind, she did insist. 

“ I don’t think you are as much interested in Mr. Kingsworth 
as you were, France,” she said boldly. “You have scarcely 
asked a w’ord about him, all the while. Or were you interested % 
Perhaps I thought you must like him because I did. He has 
certainly been very kind ; and he is not a common man.” 

Now France turned categorical. 

“ I do like him,” she said with a directness that seemed to 
challenge Miss Ammah’s inquisition. “ But I can live without 
him. Not common, no. He ’s too far out of the common. He 
is a man you want an interval between. I could n’t keep up 


270 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


with him every day. In fact, Miss Ammah, I ’ve always known, 
and I know it more and more, that I ’m nothing but a between. 
I have a great reverence for teachers and preachers ; but I prefer 
to consort — with the ‘ taught and the praught.’ ” 

And then France laid her finger on her lip, holding a smile 
there, while her eyes fixed themselves with a sudden, intense 
deliberation. 

Miss Ammah was answered, and knew that the minister was. 

France turned to her, with her finger on her lip, and a mute, 
funny, beseeching face. 

“ I 've half a mind not to ask you a question all day,” said 
Miss Ammah petulantly, “and keep you there, with your 
rhymes and your wishes ! What have you wished for' I wonder, 
when you don't w'ant — ” 

“ Thank you ! Thank you ! ” cried France exultingly. “ I ’ve 
wished, yes, I ’ve wished for just common sense, — I don’t say alto- 
gether for myself. What a nice world this would be, if we could 
only, most of us, have that, and know when it ’s all we ’ve got, and 
be contented with it, and stay where we belong ! but everybody 
now must be so fine and superior, somehow, if not in themselves, 
then by some sort of annexation. There is n’t any comfortable 
multitude left to sit down upon the grass. I don’t mean, if I 
can possibly help it, to desert the multitude.” 

“ You can’t. You can only desert your place in it, if you 
make a mistake. The multitude is all round the planet.” Miss 
Ammah rehearsed her favorite sentiment, in which she retained 
copyright, notwithstanding pulpit elucidation ; but her nose 
was not horizontal, this time. It inclined itself with a gentle 
thoughtfulness. It directed its line, not across France Everidge’s 
head, but downward, in the parallel of a glance that fell, almost 
tenderly, upon France’s face, as the girl sat on the low piazza 
step, with her work-basket on the floor above her. There is a 
great deal in the coincidence, or otherwise, of this line of the 
nose with the line of vision. 

“Yes ’m,” said France, not looking up, but prinking with her 
finger-tips the set of her marigolds and blue bows. “ And it ’s 
a lovely old planet, too ! and I like things to keep, generally, 
pretty close to it, for common living. I don’t mind an occa- 


“ NOT HALF GOOD ENOUGH.” 271 

sional sweep upward, — of a rainbow, for instance ; but I ’m 
thankful the rainbow is an arch, and not a column. The 
nicest of it is where it touches the ground. That ’s the way 
it is here, among these hills. It starts, and drops, right out of 
the grass and trees, and into them again.” 

France chattered on, half in earnest, half ’at random, wholly 
bent upon escaping the personal point of the subject ; settling 
her ribbons as she talked. 

“Would you like to start and drop that way? Could you 
live among the grass and trees all your life ? ” 

“ How should it ever be possible to me, Miss Ammah ? I didn't 
start that way.” 

“Well, drop then!” said Miss Ammah, provoked at the 
girl’s coolness. 

“ You can’t drop up," answered France. “ Does n’t this look 
nice? Now, the next thing is Mrs. Heybrook’s best cashmere 
skirt, that she ’s worrying about. I ’m going to put a silk 
dado to it.” 

“ France,” said Miss Ammah, after two minutes’ checkmated 
pause, “ you will have to write to your father. He knows, and 
he ’ll be dreading and expecting. He told me he hoped you 
would belong to him for a dozen years to come.” In this little 
impromptu verbatim report. Miss Ammah neatly, and perhaps, 
pi'eveniently, discharged her conscience of a bit of matronly 
duty. 

The hat and ribbons and the busy fingers lay suddenly still 
on the girl’s lap. The mischief — that was only a cover, at best, 
to maidenly constraint, and a feeling that she did not choose to 
let come uppermost — died out of her eyes, and a different 
glisten showed there ; she was silent for a minute, herself ; then 
she said, quite simply and gently, “ Don’t think me a fool or 
a good-for-nothing. You are all a thousand times too good to 
me. I ’ll write to papa.” 

And presently she gathered up all her little millinery and 
went away. 

The result was the reception by Mr. Everidge, two days after, 
of this characteristic note, in which most was to be read in the 
blanks between the paragraphs : — 


272 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


Personal and Confidential. 

“ Dear Papa, — I was n't half good enough for the minister. 
Miss Ammah thought you would be glad to know. 

“ I think I shall belong to you for a dozen years to come. 

“ Seeing that this sending is nearly as much Miss Ammah’s 
as mine, 

“ I am yours affectionately, 

“Frances Everidqe and Company.’* 


273 


“ OLD. THUNDER.” 


CHAPTER XXVII. 

“OLD THUNDER.” 

The shallow, rambling brook that ran down behind the north 
mowing, broadened out in the hollow at the foot of the great 
field, took a spread and a turn around a group of huge boulder 
rocks, fern-draperied, and pine-crowned with a miniature forest 
of their own, and left this pretty island separated by but half a 
dozen strides of distance from the mainland on either side. 
Beyond was open pasture, that reached back to the farm boun- 
dary on that part, and was met by the rougher “ wood-pasture ” 
of the Clark Farm. Clark’s fences were always half-down, 
his land was stumpy and scrubby; but it looked wild and 
pretty over there, across the fair, open lot, where Mrs. Hey- 
brook’s flocks of turkeys ranged, and the sun lit up the swells 
and sweeps of the short, gold-ripe grass. 

The boys had flung a rude bridge from the field border to the 
island, over the water that was too deep here for stepping-stones. 
It flowed around the rocky little islet in a deep pool, where a 
' cleft or basin in the underlying ledge seemed to fill itself before 
it let the stream pass on over the lower lip. High among the 
heaped-up granite masses was a shady, cup-like chamber, half 
grotto, half bower, carpeted and cushioned with mosses and 
pine needles. 

The Sunday afternoon after her talk with Miss Ammah re- 
peated to the reader in the last chapter, while Sarell and her 
new hat had gone off for a holiday, when the old farmer was 
dozing in the keeping-room rocking-chair close beside his wife’s 
bedroom door, and Israel sat reading by his mother’s window, 
while she too, slept, and Miss Ammah up stairs was enjoying her 
one weekly daytime pap, France, finding herself alone, betook 
herself, with her book, down the mowing, 

18 


274 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


She made a pretty moving spot of color as her white skirt 
swept the little knobbed heads of the low grasses, and her scarlet 
cardinal cape contrasted brightly with her dress and the dark 
green of the bushes scattered along the waterside, and of the 
pine thicket toward which she walked. She had broken one 
bright bough from the undermost great branch of a maple-tree, 
and was using it for a shade against the westing sun, and the 
leaves made a responding glow and flutter to those of the long 
hood-ribbons of her cloak that the west wind blew behind her. 

A pretty picture of color thrown out more and more against 
the shadow and the green of the copse as she went ; but there 
was no living creature, this side, to see her so. She wandered 
slowly down, alone in all that outstretch of billowy gi*een hill- 
side, the house sleepy and quiet, with shut blinds, behind her. 

A living creature from far away upon that other side, how- 
ever, saw her ; saw the brilliant fluttering of her scarlet cloak 
and its long ribbons, and the waving of the bough, like a red 
and golden flame in the fiery sunlight, — a great, fearsome crea- 
ture, with sullen eyes that set themselves with a steady, 
threatening glare toward her from under a square, shaggy 
forehead and short, sharp, cruel horns, — Farmer Clark’s cross 
bull, with the ring in his nose, that was almost always kept 
chained in the barn, or only let out in the far cliff* meadow 
beyond and below the steep forest pasture. 

Around the cliff, up through the woodland, and now over the 
broken fence to the further slope of the Heybrook Ibt he had 
strayed, sniffing and booing in his restless, half-excited fashion, 
till, from across that long distance, he caught a glimpse of the 
bright moving figure, and watched it with that sullen menace 
to see if it did move, — if it were a living thing to spend a fury 
on. Then he shook his shaggy head and cruel horns with quick, 
sharp tosses, snorted, puffed, and sped on with lowered front 
down the pasture-side. Every now and again that half roar 
trembled on the air like a broken mutter of thunder, — thunder 
with a voice in it. 

But France did not see, or hear to apprehend. She was timid 
enough of cows if she had to meet them close, but she had become 
used, here, to the far-off sounds of cattle, and she did not dis- 


“OLD THUNDER. 


275 




tinguisli this to divine the difference. She was looking down 
among the little strawberry-vines, whose early-turning leaves 
showed here and there half-buried gleams, like the gleams of 
summer fruit ; at the clouds of springing grasshoppers that 
were leaping up into the warmth as if they were the embodied 
gladness of the live earth under the long sweetness ; at the 
brown-winged, gold-flecked butterflies that stayed so late in their 
pretty autumn dress ; at the empty nests here and there, out of 
which she had watched the ground-sparrows’ broods hatching in 
the earlier time ; and she was thinking of all that earlier time, 
growing late and short now, and leaving or gathering in its late- 
ness and briefness so much that she had never enjoyed or 
thought of before, — so much of a world that she had never been 
born into before ; that she was only a baby three months old 
in now. 

And while she walked and pondered, the great, shaggy shape 
was coming on obliquely from behind her, slanting his line as 
she lengthened hers. As he descended through the cradle-dip 
of the undulating field he ceased his half roars, losing sight of 
the exasperating object, but when his heavy head and horns 
and terrible eyes reared themselves over the hither swell of 
land and he caught view of it again, he gave forth a real, angry 
bellow and plunged on faster, faster toward where his path should 
strike on hers, with only the narrow stream between them, 
so shallow here in its upper course, so undefended often at fre- 
quent intervals by the kindly tangles of its broken hedgery. 

Nobody can mistake that sound of a bull’s roar. France gave 
a shuddering start and looked fearfully about her. But all this 
peaceful field was wide and safe ; some elder-bushes fringed the 
water by her side, and through them she could not instantly 
discern the whereabouts of that which well enough kept trace 
of hers, never losing from its relentless gaze the sunlit scarlet 
of her dress as it went gleaming on behind the green. There 
came another roar, and the sound shook all the air about her. 
A dreadful trampling and bounding, and it felt close upon her. 

Electrified in every nerve, she sprang, she hardly knew 
whither or from what ; she was in the midst of some half- 
comprehended horror which enveloped her, helpless. The great 


27G 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


space around her was all one inescapable danger. The air 
wrapped her with a threat like a fire. 

But her spring brought her forward to where the alders 
lessened and sloped down to one of the broken, gullied spaces, 
and the threat, the peril, defined itself. 

Across the little brook, with nothing between her and it but 
the rough channel-hollow, the rippling water, and the ridges of 
loose, water-washed stones that made low natural walls along 
the sides, she saw — with horns now angrily tossing, now with 
head plunged downward to tear the ground, tail flung out rigid 
with fury, eyes glaring, hot, snorting breath panting toward 
her, making short sidewise bounds along the division line of 
bank and bush and stone and flowing current — the fierce, 
enormous beast whose like she had never seen before, but which 
she knew now face to face as if she had known him, and this 
that was coming to happen, all the days of her life. 

The hot fi'ight turned cold with a gathering back of vital 
force to heart and brain as she faced and realized the thing. 
It was not courage that came to her so much as a singular 
trance-like concentration upon the instant’s situation and neces- 
sity. Everything else of life and consciousness, instead of 
flashing up in wonderful intrusive review such as she had been 
told and had read of, blotted itself out. There was but this 
one moment, this one fact, of all ever or anywhere. 

She and this monster, and the question between them. 
Every breath of its and hers was a nameless period of time. 
Every step was a stage in a prolonged, intense experience. For 
neither she nor it stopped wholly short ; some delivering in- 
stinct helping her to act on what had not time to shape itself 
into a definite perception, and to know in her very body, with- 
out waiting for it to come through her mind, that the creature 
was tracking her along that boundary whose mere appearance 
■would be nothing to its power if an absolute pause invited him 
to make a rush across it, or if it entered his brute head that 
he might cross it and pursue her. 

The gulch was rough and deep just here ; the lines of mar- 
ginal stones were the suggestion of a barrier, scarce more 
Presently the short growth thickened itself, and grew tall 


“ OLD THUNDER. 


277 


y9 


again. Behind that, she would be as behind a fence ; but 
beyond again, she knew very well there was a different open- 
ing and a smoother outspread, a place where a cat might almost 
run across. 

She dared not stop : to go back would be to pass the 
creature, to say nothing of more exposed points still and the 
longer distance and up-hill, — the beast, with his glare and his 
tossing horns and his horrible tread aud his hot roar, always 
following her. 

She walked on fast, therefore, with limbs that felt tense with 
the strain that couquers trembling. She kept the parallel line : 
if she had run from the brook, the bull would have dashed 
after her. He kept over against her, with his short, angry 
leaps, his sniffs, his snorts, his growlings. She gained the 
bosky covert, over whose tops she could still see the glaring 
eyes, the tossing horns. She held her look, through the very 
trance of dread, steadfastly on the awful look that met her, 
and still moved on to keep him moving. 

When the protecting hedge stretched only its last few yards 
between them, she turned square toward it and stood still. 

The bull squared himself also, and stood still, in his fashion, 
pawing and snorting. 

She half turned backward on her steps, and he turned. 
Then, instantly, like a flash, she wheeled ; and before he could 
comprehend, or follow the quick movement with his ponderous 
bulk, she gleamed in her scarlet drapery across the break, down 
the swift pitch that the brook made into the glen-hollow, and 
gained the shelter of the thick button-bushes below, all overrun 
with vines of bittersweet springing among the first great out- 
crops of the ledge to which the face of the hill bared itself. 
Here, besides, the water-channel made a quick beud toward the 
pasture. 

She snatched her cloak from her shoulders, bursting it from 
its fastening at the throat, and flung it high across the bushes ; 
then ran, as she had never run before, along her right-angled 
path, while the brute made his headlong, furious bolt at the 
point she left behind her. 

A moment more, and the deep water was between her and 


278 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


the unreasoning creature, who would not go back to where he 
might have followed her, but came plunging on behind the 
broadening thicket and the spreading stream. 

Over the bridge, and up the rude rock-niches, and into the 
safe, pine-shaded grotto. There she dropped full length, not 
fainting, — France was one of those who could not faint, — 
but powerless in every muscle, deadly weak and trembling in 
every nerve and fibre ; breathless, almost pulseless ; grasped at 
last by that which had not gi-asped her. 

Rael sat reading — not his book, not the hillside that sloped 
up restfully toward the sky, as he looked forth at it from his 
mother’s east window, written all over as it was with the word 
of the grass and the late little golden stai-s of the dandelion 
and the shadow of the light-moving clouds above it westward, 
and the soft scamper of the gentle whiffs of wind across it. 

He was reading neither this nor that. 

He too was thinking of that brief time, the early and the 
late summer, which had been to him a lifetime that he had 
never lived before. 

Bernard Kingsworth had stayed away, overstaying his en- 
gagement. He would not have done that, if there had been 
any engagement here. That question had answered itself, as 
questions do when you wait to let them. What then? Was 
there any question at all for him ? Only this, and it was not a 
question. France Everidge was all of womanhood to him, and 
would be, whether out of all womanhood God could make a 
wife for him or not. That asking lay unsolved in the afi&rma- 
tion of the whole. 

Would he tell her this before she went away? Would he 
dare tell her? 

Not that he thought now of the little differences, and was 
afraid of them. Somehow they had all vanished before that 
nobler fear that, like the fear of the Lord, is the beginning of 
highest, most beautiful knowledge, that changes from fear to 
lovely reverence without fear, only when the perfect, answered 
love comes and replaces it. He knew the difficulties, the im- 
possibilities, or he would have known if it had been direct 


“ OLD THUNDER.” 279 

question of them ; but he had no fear, no doubt of outside 
judgment from France Everidge herself. 

Should he tell her, — give her all the truth to go away with, 
let it be what it might to her, — or should he let her go away 
without it, — let their lives, that were these three months old 
together, detach themselves from each other, part separate 
ways, and get different and divided from each other more and 
more 1 

Should n’t he at least thank her once for what she had been 
to him this summer-time 1 He thought he would at least do 
that. 

He could not ask her anything. How could he, till he had 
something more to givel Himself? Yes, he could give that; 
but himself was not all he must be when he should ask, if 
ever he could, France Everidge to take him. 

Upon his thoughts bi*oke suddenly that outward sound, 
crashing the summer Sunday stillness. 

Lyman, lounging in the kitchen-porch, with Bowse at his 
feet, spoke across through the open door and window ways. 
“ Old Thunder has got up into the Clark pasture,” he said. 

Bowse, a cattle-dog, knowing every horned head within three 
miles, and a perfect beadle among the herds, — flying in among 
them if any were out of bounds, and separating the mixed 
companies, turning each farmer’s own toward its own belonging, 
— lifted up his head, sniffed and snorted much, in his way, as 
Old Thunder sniffed and snorted in a bigger; both battle- 
fashion, both qui-vive to the scarlet from afar off. 

Lyman laid his hand on the dog’s collar. “ Don’t get oxcited. 
Bowse ! ’t ain’t your Thunder. No need to run after what you 
can’t tackle with when you ketch up.” 

“ That sounds nearer than Clark’s woods,” said Israel. “He ’s 
over in our piece, and he ’s after something.” 

“Gobblers,” said Lyme carelessly. “Can’t gobble them.” 

Rael went to the north window and looked out. Old Thunder 
was down in the cradle-dip, now, sniffing and muttering to 
himself as he went along, Rael saw nothing. 

The next was that frightful roar from just below upon the 
hill. Bowse bounded up with a big bark. 


280 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


Israel strode into the keeping-room and out upon the west 
piazza, then back in a single instant, with a white face. 

“ Where ’s Miss Everidge 1 ” he demanded, with a question 
like a pistol-shot. 

“ Up stairs,” said Lyman, with his usual coolness. “ Hold on, 
Bowse ! We ’ll see, old boy.” And with his fingers in Bowse’s 
collar he went out at the end door. 

Israel leaped to the foot of the stairs. “ Miss Everidge ! ” 
he called. 

Miss Ammah answered sleepily, as if raising herself up and 
looking round her as she spoke, “ She is n’t here. She went 
out, I guess. She came and got her hat and cape.” 

That red cape ! Rael knew all now. 

Lyman and Bowse had disappeared. 

Rael ran, hatless, down the mowing. 

The drop of the land hid everything. It was below there that 
something, he did not let himself think what, was happening. 
The bull was trampling and tearing, bellowing hideously. 
Rael heard the bushes crashing. 

Suddenly something went up, dark, into the air, — dark, with 
a scarlet flutter about it. It was gone down in an instant. 
It did not look like — did it 1 He could not recall in that next 
horrible second how it had seemed. Dear Lord in heaven ! 
what should it look like 1 Rael, in an whirlwind of agony, that 
was lasting ages, shot down the hill. 

He never could tell, after that, in what order his sensations 
came to him. The glimpse across the break in the brook- 
shrubbery, of the bull, head down, trampling and tearing; a 
heap upon the ground ; a scarlet glimmer through the cloud of 
dust and clods that flew at every plunge ; the horrible, heavy 
snarl of hungry rage ; the barks of the dog, rushing with his 
small fury at the heels of the huger ; his own mad cry, that 
went forth from him above it all, and that he heard before he 
knew that he was uttering it, — a great imprecation, the only 
word he ever spoke like that, and yet that was not blasphemy, 
but a fiery, challenging appeal from all that was human in him 
to all that was human in Almighty God, against all beastly, 
fiendish savagery and helpless sacrifice upon the earth; the 


“OLD THUNDER.' 


281 




partial lull of the tumult, as Bowse, fresh and eager, drew off 
the bull by bounds and barks to a new pursuit, and then 
dashed away before him over the steep upland ; the uprising 
of that white figure in the high, rocky shelter ; the out-flinging 
of her arms toward him ; her sharp, clear cry, “ Rael ! Rael ! 
1 ’m safe ! ” 

Lyman, coming down after the dog, across the brook and 
upon the pasture side, had seen sooner and more clearly that 
a torn-up mass of hedge and clinging earth, with the red cloak, 
however it had come there, was all the beast had got to satisfy 
his frenzy on ; that he was half tired already ; that Bowse 
would keep him in tow, and cunningly head him on toward his 
proper quarters ; that his own shortest course was to keep on, 
cross lots, to the Clark farmhouse and send out the men : 
and presently all the brookside and the field were nearly 
still again, only Bowse’s receding barks and the snortings of 
old Thunder sounding farther and farther toward the forest- 
line. 

Rael came up into the grotto chamber. 

The strong fellow’s limbs all trembled, even as the girl’s had 
done. He looked at France an instant, with eyes that showed 
his soul through ; then he grasped a shelf of rock with both 
hands, and leaned his face down upon them. 

France came to his side. Something like a dry sob shook 
the shoulders, whose manly strength would have been but as a 
reed to save her from that awful danger. 

She laid her hand upon him. “ Rael ! Rael ! ” she said. 
“ What is it 1 Did you think — ” 

Rael lifted up his face, turned himself, brought his hands 
round from their hold upon the rock, and took her hand in 
them as it slid down from his shoulder. 

“ I think I could not live if you had been hurt,” he said. 
“ The very hairs of your head are precious — and I could not 
help you ! ” 

Her hand was in his ; his voice was deep and trembling ; 
from his eyes came forth the intensity of the feeling that even 
now he restrained in speech. He did not say “ to me,” when 
that utterance had broken from him, taking the very form that 


282 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


God’s love, spoken to man, has made holy. “Precious?” Yes; 
to all who had ever known her, bright and pure and sweet 
and strong as she was, a flower of lovely and noble girlhood. 
There w^as no word for her to answer ; yet his whole soul had 
laid itself down before her : he “ could not live if she had been 
hurt.” 

His doubt had determined itself ; in the thrill of the circum- 
stance that had befallen, he had shown her his heart, with 
herself in it. Yet she was in other hearts also. He asked her 
for nothing back. He had said all he had any right to say ; 
he was too worldly-simple to think he could not say that truth 
of truths, and say no more. And in the face of death and 
blessed escape, he had said it, and left it where it was. 

Finance had turned deadly pale ; she had put her other hand 
out against the rock, to steady herself. He had told her 
heaven’s truth, if he had left nothing to be answered. What 
was heaven’s truth in her own heart? For one instant only, 
that demand, which she was not ready for, rushed upon her. 

That and the impossibilities in her and about her smote 
together, and it was as if her heart were between them. 

Must she face it now, that truth, whatever it was that she so 
shrunk from, and honestly let him know ? Would it answer in 
spite of her, as it had spoken from him, who had asked nothing? 
And then, what would she have done, and what would, what 
could come of it ? There was hardly anything distinct in her ; 
she only felt the two terrible forces that these questions 
would have represented, had they taken shape of words. 

She made a desperate effort against the faintness that seemed 
coming back again. She would not sink, nor sit ; she stood up 
straight, and the red rushed up to her cheeks and lips, as she 
wrestled herself from that helplessness, her sharp self-command 
her only restorative. Then tears came to her eyes. 

“ I am not fit to thank you, dear Mr. Rael,” she said ; and it 
was all she could say. 

The moment was over in which she could have given back as 
he gave her. 

But she had given him that one warm syllable that any 
friend might give. She w^as kind ; she was not offended ; the 


“ OLD THUNDER.” 283 

woman-angel in her made her tender, dealing with his boldness. 
That was how it seemed to Rael. 

He did not let go the hand he held ; but he only drew it 
through his arm, for help. “ You must let me help you,” he 
said ; and then she moved to go down with him from the rock. 
“ They will be frightened at the house,” said she. 

So they descended the broken pathway, and crossed the 
stepping-stones. He went before her on these, reaching back a 
firm grasp to her, to assist her as she followed. Then he made 
her take his arm again, and they climbed the rolling hillside. 

She trembled and lost her breath with the ascent of the 
steep breaks and knolls. Her strength had not come back to 
her so that she could retrace calmly, were that all, the way she 
had come in the face and jaws of a tremendous terror. Rael 
had almost to lift, as well as lead her, once or twice, up the 
long steps of natural terrace. But he did it just as simply as 
he had lifted her into the wagon on that evening w'hen she had 
hurt her knee. They were just the same as they had been 
before. That was what he thought she meant and permitted. 

Yet he spoke one word more before they came quite up out 
of that wide field-solitude in which they were together. He 
made France sit down just below the last high roll of the as- 
cent ; and he stood before her while she rested. 

“ Miss France,” he said, as he gave her his hand once more, 
to help her rise, “ I cannot say it again if I do not now. You 
are not offended 1 You will forgive me, — you will let me be 
your friend 1 ” 

And France lifted her eyes full into his, and answered, “Yes, 
Rael. My friend, always.” 


284 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


CHAPTER XXVIII. 

THE SENSE OF IT. 

France made as light as possible of her adventure in discuss* 
ing it with Miss Ammah, “ He was a frightful object,” she 
said ; “ but he was on the other side of the brook, and when I 
found out it was my red cape he was after, I tossed it over to 
him. Lymaii and Bowse took care of the rest. Of course it 
shook me a little.” 

Nobody but Rael knew how terribly near she had been to 
death ; nobody but France knew what it had been to Rael. 

Perhaps Miss Ammah, keen enough to discern that there was 
a reticence, observed them sharply, to judge just how far and 
to what it extended ; she knew enough of human nature to un- 
derstand that they had been brought into a sufficient closeness 
of experience to test whatever closeness of feeling was possible 
between them. 

Nothing appeared, but that they did not mean she should be 
frightened into future anxieties, and that they were quietly 
friendly after all was over, as usual. If they had gone through 
this, — well. Miss Ammah began to feel, perhaps, that France 
was really odd enough to keep odd ; and that Rael’s good sense 
and cool self-recollection were indefinitely to be trusted. 

France herself walked now in a sweet, calm dream, possible 
only to that beautiful girlhood which, resting in itself for the 
while God means in putting it between childhood and woman- 
hood, looks on into life as a duration, pure, unfevered, of all 
lovely relations that can be begun in a fervor of the spirit 
which is not so much as touched with the tumult of passion. 
It had been this gracious maidenliness, shrinking from being 
touched by it, that had retreated, as with a caprice of repug- 


THE SENSE OF IT. 285 

nance, from the presentiment of Bernard Kingsworth’s love- 
seeking. 

She was so glad that Kael had asked something of her ; that 
he had asked that, — her promise to be his friend, and that she 
had given it. It put her at peace. 

She knew very well that he had never asked Miss Ammah to 
be his friend. 

He was her friend, for always ; and all eternity was before 
them. 

France found herself feeling strangely satisfied. This strange, 
eventful summer was ending in making her very happy. 

llael went in and out about his work and his errands. He 
presumed upon nothing. He was chiefly desirous to prove that 
he could care for her, as she now knew he did, without presum- 
ing. It is possible — however almost incredibly rare — that 
there should be a youth of manhood correspondent to that youth 
of womanhood, impassioned first and for a time with an ardor 
at once of the highest and the lowliest, between which the 
eagerness of self-seeking waits as if unawakened. Especially, 
as here, when a definite, selfish seeking is made to seem nearly 
preposterous. 

France, on her part, was only anxious to go on as if nothing 
had happened to be gotten over, to take this friendship frankly, 
as she desired it. She ceased questioning with herself. Those 
old comparisons were over. It was all settled. Rael was abso- 
lutely worthy : all her interest had been the finding out of 
that, and the hoping he would not think too little of her to 
suppose that she could find it \ of all which, in the different 
nature of things, there had been nothing with the other. This 
subtile shadow of comparison was in the background. 

Now she knew what Rael thought of her ; he cared for her 
to be his friend. The happiness of that had only its own 
growing before it. 

Within three days from the danger that had begun all this 
for her, and during which it had been but a silent thought be- 
tween them, and their outward intercourse of the very slightest, 
there came fresh letters from her family, full of the engagement, 
of course, full also of new plans. 


286 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


^Irs. Everidge wrote for France to come down and join them 
for a few weeks at the seashore. They were all going to Mag- 
nolia together. Phemie and Mr. Kaynard liked it so much 
better than Princeton ; and it would be good also for the little 
ones. Mrs. Everidge had decided to allow them to lose the 
beginning of their school for the gain of the change. She said, 
— “I feel that you must have had quite enough of that farm- 
house and the sicknesses. How unlucky it has all been ! I 
want you to get something really worth while before the sea- 
son is altogether gone. Besides, there are so many plans to be 
thought over, and you will soon be as my ‘ second eldest,’ now. 
Miss Ammah has been very kind ; but I do not think she will 
look upon it as hurrying you away from her, after all this while. 
We shall expect you to meet us in Boston on Monday, the 20th. 
Send your trunks across to Eastern station, and take your 
handbag for the night at home, as we shall. We leave again 
next day. Your father is in New York on business ; will come 
to Magnolia on his return.” 

Helen wrote : — 

“You poor, little, unfortunate France! it hasn’t been 
worth while to pity you too much until we could do something 
about it ; but we have pitied you, with your shut-up days in a 
forlorn farmhouse ; with your nursing, and your lame knee, and 
your broken-down hostess, and your nursing again ; everything, 
to the very pole of the wagon, falling through and upsetting 
you, in all your pleasant expectations. Why did n’t you come 
back with papa ? It was such a good opportunity for you to 
get off. 

“ Now, we really have a chance for you. September, and even 
October, is lovely at the shore ; and the geese all fly away at 
the first cold. Just about the equinoctial, you can have your 
choice of rooms and the devotion of the hotel people. The 
knowing ones take the vacant places, the cheaper terms, and 
the delicious kiss-and-make-up of the sunshine. You will 
really get th® cream of the season. There will be quite a nice 
little few whom you know, and — but I won’t tell the best till 
you get here. For ourselves, we are dying — especially me, 


THE SENSE OF IT. 


287 


since Phemie is of no account any longer — to have you back 
again. I hate scattering. It is so much nicer every way for a 
family to he a family. In such places, people are of far more 
consequence. The Uppertons are returning to town; that is 
bad ; but they have to. Madam Byland’s nurse has broken 
down, and is leaving her; and the old lady is very feeble. 
Enid hates it awfully, — the leaving, I mean, just as — but I 
said I would n’t tell you ; only half the girls that have been and 
gone will be wild when they know. 

“ Never mind your things ; we sha’n’t regularly dress, now 
that the rush is over; besides, you can’t have had out your 
prettiest up there in the wilderness. I always think the height 
of the dressing is the height of nonsense. Nobody is anything, 
because everybody is everything. One might as well be a wire 
frame at an opening. I always save up some delicious little sim- 
plicities till the fuss and feathers are over, and we don’t call it 
dress and it is n’t ; but it ’s high art all the same, and it gets 
appreciated. I won’t write more, for on Monday we shall see 
you. Kind regards to Miss Ammah.” 

How strangely it all read to France ! Words out of a differ- 
ent world, from away behind her, where she had not been for 
so long. And they overtook her here in this quite other place 
of her life, where they at home knew nothing of her being. So 
far apart, as they begin to follow their separate lines, do those 
of a family drift and drift, and think they are of one household 
all the while ! 

France wrote to her mother : — 

“ Dear Mamma, — You are so dear and kind to me, and wish so 
much to give me pleasure, that I think you will let me tell you 
what my pleasure really is. And please let me say this : when I 
was a little girl, you used to say to me, ‘This is best, Frances ; 
mamma knows.’ And then you did ; and so here I am to-day, 
with certainly some good sense in me that I should not have 
had if mamma had not known. Now, — I mean it quite 
daughterly and thankfully, — don’t you think the time is come 
when perhaps I ought sometimes to be the one to say, ‘ This is 


288 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


best ; trust me, mamma ’ 1 When it only concerns myself, I 
mean ; if you need me, I won’t think what is best for myself. 
But I am going to just dare to stay over next Monday, and 
hear from you instead of meeting you then ; because I am sure 
it is best for me here a little while longer ; and that, in some 
ways that I can’t explain, I owe it to the friends I am with and 
have made here, not to run away in what would seem from 
some special circumstances a hurry to get away. This has 
been a beautiful summer to me, and has done me good. I 
don’t want to break the wholeness of it and patch on something 
else. I don’t feel ready for the seashore or for company, or for 
all the mix that it would be at Magnolia. When I come home, 
I want to come right home, with only you and the girls ; espe- 
cially now that so much is going to happen. I should get odd 
and fractious, and spoil all the other pretty parts, if 1 had to 
come down and perform among the people who will think our 
family affairs are just a piece of society-play, for them to sit 
audience at, and criticise or applaud. You don’t know how 
different it is here among these still, grand hills. 

“ I have written my mind right out to you, dear mamma, 
and I hope you will see the sense of it. Anyway, I am always, 
— and waiting your commands if you send them, — 

“Your loving daughter, 

“ France.” 

Whether she saw the sense of it or not, as such, Mrs. Ever- 
idge did not think it worth while to insist. She was a little 
uneasy with her conjectures, at first, and had half an impulse to 
write four words to Miss Ammah, — “Is it that minister?” 
But there was in France’s letter a tone of generous confidence 
in her confidence that made it seem a sort of peeping and mean- 
ness to do that. Besides, she knew very well that Miss 
Ammah was just the one to slap the door in her face if she 
did peep. 

When Mr. Everidge came down to them, she questioned 
him, and learned that “ that minister ” was no longer at Fellaiden 
for the present; also, that, wherever he was, he was a fine 
fellow, and quite above the country -parson level, and was 


THE SENSE OF IT. 


289 


“ worth ” at least a hundred thousand dollars. In his own 
mind, Mr. Everidge had doubts about the dozen years, and 
whether the very mention of them were not indicative that 
France might have hastily spoken, through surprise, what she 
had scarcely made sure of, and if she might not, very early in 
their course, manage yet to make up the other half of that 
worthiness in which she suddenly found herself lacking. But 
he said nothing of all this to his wife. He would n’t have 
France bothered. She should do as she pleased. 

Of course, Euphemia and Helen said “ I told you so ” to 
their mother, and were each a little offended, — Euphemia that 
the importance of her engagement had not brought France 
home, and Helen that her charming letter, and the promotion 
to her full comradeship in society, had neither fascinated nor 
coaxed. But Enid Upperton stayed on at Maernolia, accepting 
Mrs. Everidge’s matronizing in return for her naotherV U) Effie 
and Nell, and Helen was consoled. 


19 


290 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


CHAPTER XXIX. 

CROWNED HEAD. 

There had been a suggestion at Fellaiden for France to see, 
or see what was to be seen fi'ora, “ Crowned Head,” a high suna- 
mit of the Back Hills, before she should go home. This had 
been all put off, and apparently forgotten for a time, in conse- 
quence of Mrs. Heybrook’s illness. But on the very morning oi 
the Sunday of France’s adventure with the bull, it had been 
adverted to again. Rael had spoken of it, as he stood with the 
two ladies on the piazza, where they sat enjoying the particiilar 
deliciousness of that hour between breakfast and church-time, 
when the hallow and rest of the day have just begun, and its 
early beauty is like the creation-blessing upon it. 

. The maples were sending up shoots of flame all through the 
woods, — the first kindling of the blaze that would be shortly 
wrapping the hills in an indescribable splendor. 

“ We ought not to give up Crowned Head,” Rael said. 
“ Could n’t it be managed this week, some day 1 ” 

Now Miss Ammah would no more have been driven up 
Crowned Head than she would have laid her own upon the 
block, — supposing there were blocks and executions, in these 
eighteen hundred and seventies, and in these United States. 
It was a road that was travelled now only by mountain torrents, 
and by these, of course, not up, although forty years ago it had 
been a post-road from one county town straight over to another. 
Mrs. Heybrook was out of the question ; there was only Sarell, 
and it was pretty evident she could ill be spared, besides that 
she was on a height of hurt dignity or feeling, just now, with 
Rael. 

Rael had wondered, rather severely — with that gravity and 
briefness of expression that were severe from him — how she 


CROWNED HEAD. 


291 


sould think of leaving for East Hollow so long as his mother 
wished to keep her, “ She will need somebody all winter,” he 
had said, when Sarell had spoken of October, “and she has 
always considered yow.” 

It was hard for the girl, when nothing — not even walking 
pride in a grass-green silk — woxild have been more to her 
mind, if “ all things had been accordin’,’’ than to stay on with 
the Heybrooks through the long half-year. She shut her 
mouth with a secret sense of the injury that nobody knew, after 
she had said, once for all, — “I sha’n’t leave nothin’ at sixes ’n 
sevens, you need n’t think. I mean t’ see her p’ovided ; an’ 
I don’t calk’late on no more jants n’r vis’tius, after Sunday. 
I sh’ll take hold ’v the t’mayters, an’ pickle them, next week ; 
an’ week after, I sh’ll go inte’ the soft soap ’n candles ; an’ I 
mean t’ see t’ the cider apple-soss ; an’ ’f I anyways can, I ’ll 
come over t’ the pig-killin’. But I know where my dooty is, 
betwixt then ’n then, ef H is you, Rael Heybrook.” And as Rael 
received her words in silence, she had turned a spasmodic chok- 
ing in her throat into a desperately exaggerated clearing of the 
same, and resumed her mopping down of the already stainless 
shed-room floor, with an extra dip into the pail of clear water, 
and a sweep along the boards that was as good as a dismissal to 
him ; and after she had so sent him off, flung down mop and 
all, rushed up into her bedroom overhead, and had a good 
hearty five-minutes’ cry, into which she put all the misery and 
relief that might have consumed days and nights with a more 
leisurely heroine. 

Sarell, you see, had to get the dinner, and she could not 
afford to turn her sleeping into weeping hours. She did her 
grief up as it came along, as she would have done any other 
“ chore,” and it was disposed of. 

But she was on her dignity of secret consciousness ; there 
would be no “ skylarkin’ ” for her off to Crowned Head. 

“ Will you let me drive Miss France, if she will go, on the 
little buckboardi” asked Rael outright. 

Miss Ammah looked up at him, straight into his modest, 
honest face. He would hardly have asked that of her, that 
way, had there been anything behind. “I don’t see any 


292 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


reason why not,” she said. And with those words for all in- 
junction, even if she could have seen down into his very heart 
as it was that day, she would have trusted him to be wise for 
himself and scrupulous for France. But she was really just 
now in the innocence of “invincible ignorance.” 

France said nothing, but her face softly beamed. 

That, however, had all happened in the morning. 

On the Tuesday had come one of those mountain changes in 
the weather which shut up the beauty in heavy mists, replacing 
it only with the rolling grandeur of the vapors, and the wild 
deluge of rain that sounds among numberless leafy branches 
and mingles its rush with the noise of the swollen cascades till 
the whole world seems a sweep and plash of falling waters. 

It was cold as it is in September in high places when the sun 
hides, and Miss Ammah and France had been glad to have the 
little stove in the room of the former lighted with a fire, and 
the two chambei*s thrown together for the pleasant warmth. 
The rain and the chill had continued till Thursday, then 
the wind took a grand, swift march around the hill-ranges, 
coming out from the clear northwest, and on Thursday night 
there was a first white frost. It had been on Thursday that 
France had answered her letters. 

Friday and Saturday were busy days at the farm, with work 
crowded forward from the early week by the storm. Mrs. Hey- 
brook was about the house in a quiet way, and everybody was 
hindering her, with all possible forestallings, from finding any 
work to take up again. France had long since assumed the 
regular charge of the table business, the spreading and remov- 
ing, and had instituted her own little washing arrangements on 
the spot, that the work might not pass over at all into Sarell’s 
department, to make her own help a daily offer and refusal and 
a consequent armed insistance. Up stairs she swept and dusted, 
and she kept the parlor open and cheery by the daily freshening 
touches which country parlors are hardly apt to get, and so settle 
into that indescribable deadness of original pleasant order that 
comes from things unstirred. These things were truly among 
the strong motives and “ special circumstances ” that had in- 
duced her to assert herself as to the present best and right for 


CROWNED HEAD. 


293 


her, and stay on in the “ midst ” that she was making. But, 
undeniably, it was also that she must have a little more time 
now for the clear establishing of the “ friendship " that had been 
asked and given. She could not have run away from the first 
word of that and make it, perhaps, the last. She must see, and 
let Rael Heybrook see, how it was between her and him after 
that close coming; that “Forgive me” which had taken back 
nothing, but only acknowledged what it sought pardon for. 
She must let him see that she forgave, that she was not afraid, 
that she was glad to have him care for her to be his friend. 

Would he ask her again, after all, to go with him to Crowned 
Head 1 She thought she must at least wait to know ; that 
she must not let him suppose she ran away from any embarrass- 
ment of their intercourse, as such intercourse would naturally 
have been. 

The storm and the frost over, there came days again of 
glorious sunshine, and between the keenness and the softness 
was born the early glory of the forests. The maples were 
catching fire from bough to bough ; the sumachs were shooting 
forth their crimson signal-rockets ; the little birches were 
“ dancers in yellow ” ; the chestnuts began to show beside them 
their contrasting harmonies of amber-brown ; and though the 
great old oaks, latest to change, held steadfastly their grave 
dignity of green, a young sapling here and there had put on the 
family jewels, and was soberly magnificent with carbuncle. 
The colors were early ; therefore would be most beautiful and 
perfect this year. In the warm, sheltered places and on the 
southerly inclines, the hardy pasture flowers were still bravely 
bright. It was the exquisite point of ripening before decay 
began. 

A week later than they had first spoken of, Rael said to 
France one morning, “Crowned Head will be splendid now. 
I should like you to see it. Will you go 1 ” 

He looked at her with his grave, pleasant smile. His eyes 
met hers clearly. “Will you goV’ was “Will you trust mel” 
not as it might have been, and sometimes is, “ Will you come 
and listen to me, will you answer all I have to say 1 ” It was 
rather, “ I have said all : you need have no fear of me.” 


294 


ODD, Oli EVENy 


France met his look with one as like it as he could have 
prayed for. It said, “ I believe you, utterly. I trust you with 
all that there is between us. There is nothing more to be 
spoken ; but, happen what may, we are friends absolutely, for 
always.” So she told him she would go. 

Do you begin to blame France, according to the punctilio of 
the world, which the world, in its ways, needs indeed, but which 
might not be needed were the world’s children the children of 
light 1 I think she was but following in utmost truth, so far 
as it opened before her, the way of her noblest, hopefulest life, 
and the promise of it, that could not all quite yet be read. She 
might be conscious that she was becoming, had already become, 
a great deal to Rael Heybrook in his very highest sympathies, 
in the very stronghold of his nature. She might know that he 
had never found a friend like her before. She might know, 
even, that if after this permission and continuance she were to 
go away and let it be the end, if she were to take up other 
pleasant intercourse and let it obliterate all this, if she were to 
put ties and claims that could not be spoken of here and now 
between her and it, — she would make this that she was doing 
now an injury, a wrong. But she could not possibly imagine 
that she should do any such thing. Whatever this friendship 
were, or whatever in the eternity it had begun, it should come 
to, it was first before and forever difierent from anything that 
could come again. She meant to live it out, whatever it should 
come to. She could not look forward, — she put that thought 
away, — but she could go forward, as Rael was going, as she 
knew he would go. All this had defined itself in her in sub- 
stance during this last week, though she had not set it out in 
words to herself. What it might be to them, — to her, — after 
their present intercourse was broken, to go and to remain apart ; 
what might be between of hindrance from the very fact that 
through these days there had been something that had not been 
spoken, and that she would remember she had turned from hear- 
ing as certainly as he had stopped from saying, — she had not 
realized. In the truest living there are some mistakes. 

But they went away to Crowned Head together. In a joy as 
clear and pure as the golden day itself, — in an atmosphere as 


CROWNED HEAD. 


295 


high above all earthly cloud and soil, — they climbed the 
mountain ways into yet wider delight, yet rarer and more buoy- 
ant airs. 

The little buckboard wagon, with its one seat tilting so easily 
in the middle, the low hang of it, — so that a step would take 
one to the ground, — the slow movement over the constantly 
ascending road, these were more like some delightful self-move- 
ment without fatigue along the lovely slopes, among these 
thousand exquisite things of late bloom and leafage, bright, run- 
ning water and live glistening rock, just at their feet even, 
than like riding over and past them at a height beyond the 
enjoyment that belongs to a ramble in their midst. 

They turned from the high road — if the brown, soft, narrow, 
winding track from point to point among the scattered farmsteads 
ever seems like a high road — at about half a mile’s distance 
from home; then they began the real climb, up a cart-path 
traversed only by farming teams, and by these very little of 
late years, and by the charcoal wains that came from some coal- 
pits away back in the high defiles. It was rough in the extreme, 
or France would have said so then, before she had come to the 
real extreme, when they struck off yet further from frequented 
tracks and followed, up the flank of the Crown Mountain, what 
she could hardly believe had been the post-road Rael told her of. 

Before they came to this they passed one solitary, poor house 
. — a mere roofed pen it seemed — on a flat of turf where the 
road wound round a kind of terrace. Here they stopped for the 
“ colt ” to rest a minute or two. France asked what human 
being could ever have lived up here. 

“ 0, for that matter,” Rael told her, “ a great many human 
beings have lived, and lived pretty well too, on this long moun- 
tain. I can remember when a wagon-load of them used to come 
down and round to the Centre to church every Sunday morning. 
But they have been dwindling out, and the houses and farms 
going to pieces and going wild for a great good while. One 
human being lives in this house now ; at least, she has n’t four 
feet, like those.” 

A family of pigs was rooting and smelling about the closed 
door; this was propped up with a timber; it kept the pigs out : 


296 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


nobody else, apparently, would wish to get in. Being set 
against it on the outside, it gave evidence that the occupant 
had gone out of her dwelling. To think that it should be a 
woman ! 

“Her name is Betsey Bushell. She lived here with her 
father and mother; they were a kind of wandering paupers, 
getting shelter where they could from time to time, and finally 
settling here. It was coming over here, from the next county, 
where they were threatened with the almshouse, that Betsey 
lost her mother in the woods.” 

“ Lost her ! Was she never found 1 ” 

“Never so much as her shoes. She disappeared utterly, 
Betsey spent part of the night searching for her, according to 
her own account, — the old woman had stopped, she said, and re- 
fused to go on, and she herself had kept forward, thinking she 
would follow, but finding she did n’t, went back to where she 
had left her, and found her gone, — and the rest of it in another 
old shanty, a mile back. Men turned out and searched the 
mountain ; but they never came upon any trace. Whether 
she wandered altogether away and lived a while elsewhere, or 
whether — well, it was always a queer story, and a kind of 
doubtful one. Not pleasant to think of, when Betsey brought 
berries to sell, and begged bits of cheese and pork or an old 
gown of my mother.” 

“ The father 1 ” asked France, horrified. 

“ He died a few years ago. He was a dreadful character. 
And here Betsey burrows yet. If you were to look in at that 
window ” — France shuddered — “ you would see a pile of rags 
for a bed in one corner ; a pile of potatoes for food in another ; 
the refuse of a week’s meals in another ; an old, dirty, broken 
stove in the middle, and maybe a pan of meal under it. That ’s 
what I saw there once.” 

“ And a human creature lives so ! Rael, it ’s awful ! ” With 
the divine thrill of the real human in her at this desolation 
and degradation, France felt herself drawn nearer, as for refuge, — • 
nearer, also, with the fellowship of clean and noble nature, that 
must pity such things with horror, — to Israel, her friend ; and 
his simple name dropped from her lips, the utterance of that 
feeling. 


CROWNED HEAD. 


297 


“Yes,” said Rael, with a breath’s pause after the word, 
where he did not speak her name in like manner ; “ and in this 
beautiful place, too, with the sky and the trees and that clean- 
running w^ater preaching to her all the time ! It ’s hard to 
understand.” 

“ Or to help ? ” asked France. 

“ The help ought to have been a great way back,” said Rael. 
“ It ought to have been a hindrance.” 

They went on into the rocky, disused side road. 

The quiet, sensible old “ colt ” pushed his way, brushing the 
branches with his head, and scrambling over the broken stones 
and along the irregular, nearly untraceable ruts, sometimes 
crossing the face of a smooth-worn outcrop of granite, in which 
were the old marks of wheels that had scored it years and years 
ago. “You can see that there has been heavy travel here,” 
said Rael. 

The leaves had not begun to fall ; the colors bloomed from 
heaps of summer green ; the little asters and the golden-rod 
and spikes of purple and of white mountain blossoms that 
France knew no name for, clustered by the borders ; and the 
young, tangled woodland, that was springing up for miles where 
the old timber had been long cut off, pressed close upon the 
pass. Here and there a break of pasture-land gave freer 
thoroughfare and continually enlarging outlook from one open- 
ing to another. Already they could see, in the unfolding and 
lifting of the southern range, other shoulders and summits 
rearing or gliding into view than those they were familiar with 
at Fellaiden West Side. Behind the dark-green wall of Thumble, 
that began to look low upon their right, stood sunny heights, 
some of them with mellow patches of just-reaped oat-fields near 
their very tops ; and here and there a distant blue, cloudy tip 
revealed itself between one and another of the crowding earth- 
waves, over whose heads the great horizon widened as over a 
tossed, no longer tossing, sea. 

At one place, Rael stopped his horse again. “ There ! ” he 
said, “ it was just here. You can see the cellar-mound, all 
washed in and filled up and grown over. That was a house 
when I was a little child. Here was the old garden. See the 


298 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


red balm in bloom there now, and the bushes of sweet smel- 
lage. I came here with my father, once ; some old people lived 
here — Brayne, their name was — and the old lady gave me 
flowers. They both died soon after ; then the house was 
burned ; and that was the last of the place. Over there,” point- 
ing to a blackened shell of a building on the left, higher up, 
whither some now altogether overgrown roadway must have 
led, “was the Silvernails’ Farm. They were Germans, from York 
State ; then there were the Greatraxes, — they lived off a little 
way to the west. Why, it ’s all changed in twenty years and 
less. I can remember all the names ; there were people left of 
them in the town when I was a boy ; but all these farms have 
been deserted long ago.” 

“Why!” asked France. “I mean, one doesn’t so much 
wonder, away up here, as facilities increased in other places, 
but why are there these ‘deserted houses’ all about! We have 
seen them in all our drives.” 

“ Oh, land run out, timber cut off, young men gone off West 
and to the cities, and old folks dying ; the mountain farms 
washed off gradually, and the land turned poor. All sorts of 
reasons ; but I don’t like it. I don’t want it to spread ; and it 
is spreading. I think this is a grand piece of the Lord’s world ; 
I was born here and I love it. I ’d like to be fit for as much 
as I could be made fit for ; and then I don’t know but I ’d like 
to see — well, I won’t begin upon that now, though I mean to 
tell you, if you will let me. That ’s one of the things I ’d like 
to talk about.” 

This silent, proud Rael who talked to so few ! This was how 
he wanted her also, now, to be his friend, — to enter into his 
life with him, and help him to understand it. 

“You need think of no if in the way. You may be sure that 
I shall always be glad that you can like to talk to me of these 
things,” France answered him; and the gladness subdued itself 
in her voice as she spoke. 

They came to one or two places where it was needful to alight 
and walk up rifts and heaps that were like beds of little water- 
falls; where the colt lifted himself, and Rael, going behind, 
lifted the little buckboard to the upper grade. They threaded 


CROWNED HEAD. 


299 


turns where the track led them right into pieces of thicket, and 
they had to push the branches forward with much strength, 
and stoop their heads to their knees almost, to avoid the recoil ; 
these bits passed, they seemed like gates that had let them 
through into new, secluded mountain chambers, where the road 
lay across sweet-smelling turf, and the trees stood back about 
gi'and areas, open only to the sky, and to the far-off glimpses of 
lines of hill-top higher yet. 

At last they altogether left the cart-way, which continued on 
down a side incline, and through a half-way bit of valley, to an 
ascent beyond, upon and over another open brow of highland. 
Rael let down some pasture-bars, and led the horse through 
upon a wild, rich, moorland swell, the south-lying bosom of 
“ Crowned Head ” ; where, turning at right angles from their 
direction hitherto, they faced nothing but its billowy rise, that 
swept upward toward the line of scattered pines, which, sur- 
rounding the bare, rocky summit of the mountain, showed at a 
distance like a circlet about a bald head, and had given the 
crest its name. 

They left the woodland behind them ; they rode, wheel-deep, 
through a great sea of mountain flowers and shrubs and grasses, 
tall, sweet ferns, and broad, white beds of bloom of the upland 
everlasting ; blazing patches of most richly feathered golden-rods, 
that heaped themselves here in solid-looking banks ; underneath 
were the green trail of creeping- Jenny, and the lovely, erect 
plumes of princess-pine ; now and then, where this had fruited, 
the horse’s feet trod down on to a patch of seedy spires, from 
which a smoky puff suddenly ascended, as if he had struck out 
a fire. Then there would come a little interval of waste, that 
was no waste ; for all over the ground, that looked compara- 
tively so herbless, stood up the modest little spikes of penny- 
royal, with their stinted leaves and minutest delicate-purple 
corollas ; and with the crush of hoof and wheel, up floated the 
spicy fragrance, and enveloped them with its viewless cloud of 
incense. Among it were scattered taller stems of close-blos- 
soming, deeper purple gall-of-the-earth, rare and precious to 
the country folk as a stomachic ; and faint-colored, tiny, tawny 
blooms, spiked also, like a kind of scanty-flowering heath. 


300 ODD, OR EVEN? 

A belt of rocks stopped the wagon. Beyond this, and be- 
tween it and the grand, solid mountain head, was the growth 
of pines. Eael unbuckled a rein, and turned a heavy stone 
upon its trailing end, tethering the horse safely ; then he and 
France climbed up between the craggy points and boulders, 
crossed the pine-belt, whose resinous wood was odorous in the 
sun, and came upon the final height of the bare Head, above 
the Crown. Here, at first, there were lichens and deep-tufted 
gray moss under their feet ; then the storm-washed, naked 
stone ; at last they stood upon the highest curve, -— huge, round- 
ing away in such a stretch as to make to itself an island rim, 
that if you sat low in the midst, was its own horizon, and the 
hilltop seemed as a little planet one might walk around, yet 
hung there in that wonderful blue, whose sailing clouds dropped 
their white skirts so near. 

Walking out towards its edges, was met at every point the 
glorious outlook, downward and off ; all around from lessened 
Thumble, with white Scarface rising distantly beyond him ; 
Great Quarry Hill, with the white excavation gleaming like the 
lines of a fair-built city against the dusky side ; the dun, 
shadowy mass of Iron Top ; the points and dips of cloud-like 
ranges, stretching from north to south, away down through the 
sun-flooded west ; a pond shining in a deep nook between cliffs 
and forests ; wooded crests, close by, mounding up like islands, 
or like neighbor asteroids; golden patches of sere grass or 
harvest stubble or ripe millet, lying bright upon their sunward 
slants ; all the way down the soft declivities to the wide, far- 
below valley on the west, beautiful dints and swells of farm 
lands, in every lovely tint of olive-green and buff and gold, 
the red-brown of the ripe buckwheat, and the sunny brown of 
the fallows, separated and quilted down with the low-running 
lines of fences ; white villages, their modest churches standing 
a little apart, in week-day stillness, under tall trees ; roadways, 
linking them and ribboning the green ; a mazy, blue-running 
stream marking the bed of the dale ; far, far off, a dazzling 
shine of water, straight beneath the sun, between those faint 
blue slopes just under the sky line and a break in the group of 
nearer, smaller hills ; that was a loop of the Connecticut. 


CROWNED HEAD. 


301 


Rael stood with his head bared, as he was apt to do in grand 
places ; the wind blew his hair back and his face looked noble 
with the far reach in his eyes, and the strong, satisfied quiet 
about the lines of his lips ; one hand crossed the wrist of the 
other as it dropped before him, holding his hat. 

France had taken care not to let her hair fly ; for a woman, 
that is hardly ever anything but untidy except in a picture ; it 
was held in its pretty order by her veil across the brim of her 
hat ; but the veil floated out in a soft, blue-gray haze, and her 
face freshened and brightened in the sweep of the breeze that 
came straight across those pure depths to them without an 
earth-touch on its way ; and she glowed — eyes, cheeks, and all 
— with the deepening delight that she was drinking in. She 
held in her hand a bunch of golden and lavender and purple, 
with the white of the life everlasting. 

They made a picture, — they two, — standing there in the 
midst of this wide earth and sky, the only human figures-; they 
might have been Adam and Eve in a new and braver sort of 
Paradise. A few gentle-eyed cows grazed on the level just 
below the wall of rocks; they had lifted their heads, as the 
creatures might have done in Eden, to the beautiful, superior 
pair as they passed up ; now, there was only the low, sweet 
tinkle of a bell coming up from beneath, to remind that any 
life was near but theirs, who were so silently receiving, in 
a happy wonder, the Word of all that praiseful manifest. 

At last they turned to each other. “ I would n’t have had 
you miss this,” said Rael ; and “ Oh, I thank you so for bring- 
ing me ! ” France said at the same instant, with a long-escaping 
breath of emphasis. 

It w’as as if the beauty of all this, and more, had been for 
her in his heart; as if here there had only been something 
ready-made that could but barely hint what he would think 
and wish for her and bring her to, and as if, on her part, the 
]oy of joy was that it had come through him. Yet they were 
most common words, and neither thought except most simply 
in the saying of them. So did they stand among most com- 
mon forms of things, — grass, herb, tree, rock, sky. But there 
was all that could be put into such foiTns ; it was the rtmch of 


302 ODD, OR EVEN? 

it ; there was all, too, that could be put into those little sen- 
tences. 

“ It is dry here ; will you sit down and rest ? ” Rael asked 
her, and he found her a place where the rock shelved and made 
a seat, warm in the sunshine. A little way off, where he could 
just speak in a low, natural tone, and be heard by her, but 
without the least unnecessary approach, he seated himself. 
They were at right angles to each other. She faced the west- 
ern outspread and glory ; she had to shade her eyes with a pine 
bough that he gave her for a parasol ; the sunlight fell upon 
him obliquely, sidewise, giving a glow and shade that threw 
out the lines of his head and face in their fine character. So 
he spoke, and she listened. 

“ Perhaps it is hardly fair,” he said, “ to bring you to a place 
like this, and ask your judgment upon the thing I want it in. 
There is too much in the Fellaiden scale. It is too grand to be 
here. • You see what my question isl” 

“Yes,” said France. “Whether to stay here?” Her tone 
was scarcely an inquiry, — it was just short of assertion ; and she 
waited for his answer. 

“ I want to live a life that is worth while,” said Israel. “ I 
want to make the best of myself, and do the best with the 
making of me. I knew I needed to learn ; so I have been to 
school, and down there at the institute ; and it opened out, and 
I should have followed the opening if there had not been a 
plain duty to call me back here. Now, I begin to feel as If the 
very best of me might do the best in just this spot, where I was 
born. I doubt if it is good for all the power — as it comes to be 
power — to drift together into the great centres and channels, 
and to leave the country drained. It is like all the blood that 
should be all over the body determining itself to the heart or 
the brain. Capacity, intelligence, right-mindedness, are needed 
up here among the farms. Men who can come to influence, 
and use influence, are wanted. If I could be such a man,” — 
he paused a second, as if before a seeming assumption ; then he 
went on, simply, “ I should not be satisfied with being less of a 
man anywhere, — I would like to try what I could do in my 
own natural place. Things were pretty much settled ; but 


CROWNED HEAD. 


303 


there is a fresh start and possibility, now that Miss Ammah 
has given me this lift. There are months in the year when I 
might go on with preparing myself, — I might afford to go away 
from home, leaving help enough here for the time, — and be 
ready, some time, for work outside, in the world. Would you 
do it. Miss France, or would you stay here 1 ” 

“I would be ready,” France answered. “That is what you 
mean to be 1 ” 

“Yes, ready for anything, with the whole of me. The ques- 
tion is, where I can put the whole of me to work. A man 
must choose something definite, and he has to choose early. It 
is not so very early now, in my case. Living does n’t run even, 
if plans are put off too long. One part outgrows another, 
and there come times, circumstances, when, for want of readi- 
ness, they miss the join. I won’t miss anything that I might 
be or have ; I will come, please God, to all I was meant for ! ” 

His head went up, erectly, and his eyes flashed their proud 
determination straight into France’s eyes, as she looked over at 
him. Hers lit up respondingly, “Please Him, I think you 
will, Rael,” she answered, with a warmth as brave as his. 

“Shall I go, or stay!” he repeated. “Shall I get ready 
with this purpose, or with that 1 for the purpose makes itself 
out. There are good, honest engineers — men who won’t 
cheapen human life in cheapening wood or iron, or have a stroke 
less of labor in a work than the work needs — wanted, in all 
the great branchings out of manufacture and communication ; 
and sometimes I think I should like to be there, in the thick 
of things. And sometimes I remember that the springs are up 
here, in the quiet places among the hills ; and that the Pyra- 
mid in the border of the land was in the centre,” he finished, 
smiling. 

“ That there are middles out in all the edges,” France added, 
in like manner. 

“Yes, that sermon put a good deal into my head,” said Rael, 

“ or put into shape a good deal that was there already. Mr. 
Kingsworth is acting out his own word. He keeps out of the 
drift of ministers, — it is just as bad as the other drift, — to 
where the people have everything else, and where the big sala- 


304 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


ries and the easy famousness are. He is doing a great work in 
this out-of-the-way edge, and he wants help. There is no reason 
why men should not be strong — strong for the whole country 
and the world — in these out places. Under our government, 
— if it is to be redeemed and fulfil itself, — all places are in the 
midst. That is what I think, that self-seeking runs to the 
great, quick chances, the crowded places ; and that half the 
crowded places ought never to be. That if there were none 
too crowded, too absorbing, there would be none too thin, too ill- 
supplied.” 

France, woman-like, catching the suggestion, sprang to grand, 
sweeping conclusions. “ I see,” she said. “ ‘ God made the coun- 
try ; man makes the town.’ If everybody did only the true 
between work, — if evei-ybody had a chance to do it, — there 
would not be great, overgrown cities. Perhaps men’s enter- 
prises would be of altogether a different shape, — that they 
would come to without expecting; that they do not know 
how to expect, as . things are. They would scatter ; cany 
everywhere, instead of gathering into a few great centres where 
they can turn things over and oyer, and from hand to hand, 
making every man his own pinch out of them. Every man 
■would be making the most of some little piece of the world, — 
not spoiling it, — and everything would be brought to every 
man’s door.” 

She flushed beautifully as she spoke. She had a little glimpse 
of a millennium. Rael’s heart burned as he looked at her, and 
felt the woman-element, like a torch bringing down a sacred 
fire, touch the man’s reason and purpose in him, and kindle it 
into an enthusiasm. 

“ It must be so ; it must be coming,” he said. “ Look at 
these hills — these miles and miles of beautiful lands. These are 
the great places, the rich places, — not the walled-in streets of 
cities. And the want of the cities ought to be here ; they ought to 
‘sit every man under his own vine and under his own fig-tree.’ It 
is too late, as I said about Betsey Bushell, to get that present 
want all out into the right place, maybe ; but can’t somebody 
help keep it out for the times to come 1 Is n’t there some- 
thing for men to stay and do up here? Shall I go, or stay. Miss 
France, when the chance comes 1 ” 


CROWNED HEAD. 


305 


France laughed. Her laugh was not amusement, it was just 
the uttered brightness of her smile. “ I know what you will 
do,” she said. “ You will stay.” 

“ Thank you,” he answered her. “ I wanted your word.” 

As if it had been her word at all ! As if she had done any of 
the reasoning, or had persuaded him ! It was curious consult- 
ing ; it was only “as face answereth to face in the water,” that 
there had been any answering from her to him. These two 
understood each other, after all. 

France’s heart beat to think of that. That these summer 
weeks, begun with such far-offness, such setting apart, had done 
it all. He had brought her out here into this glory, the widest 
he could show her ; and here he had shown her, also, the glory 
of his heart. 

Nothing more. He had not brought her here to say any 
common, selfish words to her, that it was not time to say ; to 
repeat, in any wise, what had burst from him in that moment 
that was almost like a moment beyond the grave. He had 
promised not to do that when he had said to her, “ Will you 
gol” 

It was curious wooing. Not a word to try her mind, to draw 
a word or look from her to show whether she could choose the 
living he was choosing — choose it anyhow — in some pleasant 
imagination even. Not a word to make her say that she, a 
woman, could delight in woman’s service here, where such 
work was to be done to “ establish the mountain of the Lord in 
the top of the mountains,” and to make the “ people flow unto 
it.” It was all man’s work, man’s choice, that he talked 
about ; where he himself should set himself “ between.” 

It was curious wooing ; yet France Everidge felt herself, in 
some high way, both sought and chosen. No other woman 
would he have sought just so. She was his friend, whatever 
came of it. He left it, as she left it, to some sure Ordering to 
bring whatever should be, by the ordering of “ the steps.” And 
this step was one. 

“ There is one thing,” Rael said presently, “ that Mr. Kings- 
woi-th has in mind, and all planned out. He sees how the 
distances in these country places are against the helps and im- 

20 


306 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


provements that might be, and how that makes the difference 
from town and city living, where things and people are brought 
continually together. He means that there shall be a circu- 
lating library here in Fellaiden at any rate; and that it shall 
circulate. It can’t be left to the chance getting of books by 
people who don’t drive once a month — and some who never 
have any way of driving at all — to any centre where the books 
could be kept. He means to get up a book-post, to go round 
once a fortnight and exchange the volumes. People can make 
out their lists of whatever they want to read, and these can be 
kept at the library, the numbers crossed off as they are supplied. 
Everybody is to help, according to ability ; then he will see that 
the deficiency is made up. Is n’t that good ? ” 

“ It ’s beautiful,” said France, in a quiet tone. She felt hum- 
bled before the great goodness of it, and of the man whose whole 
heart and life were just full and outgoing with only such thought 
and deed for “ the neighbor.” She had dared, — no, it was 
not that she had dared to refuse ; she had rather not dared to 
take to herself the dearest human giving of such a heart and 
life. It simply was not hers ; he would know it some time. The 
great Ordering that would take care of hers would take care of 
his also. She felt sure he should not lose. For herself, she 
was so happy to sit below and wait — with Rael. 

“ Then there are the schools, and the social gatherings, that 
must be, somehow ; he has them all in mind. And he needs 
people who will take things up with him, and help him carry 
them through. I believe I am right in making up my mind to 
be one.” 

“ You will be the one,” said France. 

Not a word to her, even then, of what he could dream to do, 
with the one for himself at his side in this brave paradise. 
Would the word ever be saidl The days were growing short; 
their lines were going to separate : how would it ever be % 

They went down the mountain. They kept southward down 
the long ridge, until they entered the road they had first taken 
from the highway in their ascent ; they repassed in this the 
wretched lair of Betsey Bushell ; a little way beyond they left 
the more direct way, and turned again southward, along the 


CROWNED HEAD. 307 

continued broken line of the Back Hill, descending for two 
or three miles the slowly lowering grade. 

The sun, also, was going down his evening mountain path. 
On their right hand, all the west — hilltops and heaven — was 
full of changing lights and colors. The dusk and chill came on 
when a low bank of gray vapor hid for a while the sinking splen- 
dor. All at once, the rays streamed forth again ; they looked 
round, to see one of those strange, new pictures, of which in a 
lifetime we see, if we watch, so many, and yet in all never the 
same one twice. 

Fallen from under the deep purple cloud-bank, and clinging, 
like a fiery burr, to the long, black edge of a mountain-side, 
hung the sun ; crimson light burst upward, fan-like, into the 
mist of the cloud, setting it all ablaze ; its left shoot ran up 
the slope of the mountain, and projected itself far beyond the 
crest, dividing shai-ply the wonderful light from the darkness, 
away up, up, in the dense mass of vapors ; the heart of the con- 
flagration burning and burning, till it was a pure, intense clear- 
ness ; the mists turning ever a richer and more vivid red ; the 
sun still clinging, as if caught in the bristle of the piny moun- 
tain-side. At last it dropped, — slid downward and backward 
over the lessening spur, till it went out behind the next rising 
outline, as if it had rolled along, not under, the world. 

“Did anybody ever see such a sunset 1” exclaimed France. 

“ No,” Rael answered. “ And perhaps only we two, in all this 
region where it might be seen, have seen it, just this way, 
now.” 

Only they two. At the moment when he said it, that clear, 
whistling cadence uttered itself from the woods close by, — A- 
world-for-me ! A-world-for-thee ! They rode on silently, listen- 
ing to the whip-poor-will. 

Another grave of a house, low down in a bend of brook- 
meadow ; a high hill-rampart, dark with forests, shutting it in 
behind ; lesser hills and rises clustering all about, through 
which wound the narrow roadway that had brought them be- 
side it. 

There, Rael told France, was where a father and daughter, 
living by themselves years and years ago, had been struck by 


308 


ODD, OR EVEN y 


one bolt of lightning ; their untended cows had broken from 
their pasture days after, and wandered wildly away ; distant 
farm-people had found the cattle, and then come to the house 
and found the lifeless inmates, — one at one window, the other 
at another, whei’e they had been closing them against the storm, 
when the arrow of heaven had shot through, and left them dead 
in the selfsame instant. There was something dread in this 
chill, solitary, deep-shadowed place ; there was a strange shud- 
der in the air ; the presentiment of death that must com6 had 
waited here with the night-time at the mountain-foot, after all 
the joy and beauty of their dayshiny pilgrimage. It was min- 
utes before France could quite draw natural breath again, from 
that sudden awe of the happening of “years and years ago.” 

Then she said, “ What histories of one old mountain you have 
told me to-day ! ” 

“And how much older and full of history is the mountain !” 
answered Rael. 

“ And what atoms we are in the whole earth, and the story of 
it ! ” France said again. 

“Yet we are here, and there is a way for us in it; because 
— don’t you remember, don’t yon think so, France 1 — because 
the Lord is the Lord of hosts” 

How, in such a sentence, could he put the little word of hu- 
man distinction 1 

“ That is so much easier a way to think it,” France answered 
low, “ than to have first to think one’s self up out of the hosts.” 

“ People waste their strength, trying to believe in them- 
selves,” said Rael. 

They went down a steep, scrambly, hazardous side-track 
from the ridge into the village road. It was dark here now. 
But France was not afraid : the chill and the shudder had 
passed ; they two, in the glory and in the dread, had been, and 
were still, together. There w'as a way for them in the earth, 
because the Lord was the Lord of hosts. 

For the first time, she had heard Israel speak that Holy 
Name ; and for the first time, as in that very name, he had 
spoken her own, in the way that friend may call a friend. 

As they went up Fellaiden Hill, from the north, the side of 


CROWNED HEAD. 


309 


the Centre Village, and came out upon the broad table of the 
summit, they rose up into the §oft twilight again, that had been 
quenched quite out in the low woods. Along the street, wide 
here, on the high level, and grassed at each side with a smooth 
turf for many yards, they met people coming home from their 
day’s w’ork or absence. A long timber-wagon, emptied of some 
load it had transported, turned out for them. The saw-mills 
w-ere a mile back, down in the gorge. Rael stopped, and called 
to the man who was walking beside his horses. 

“ Good evening, Mr. Osterley. I was wanting to see you, 
about some lumber stuff. What can you let me have shaved 
cedar shingles for, the thousand 1 ” 

Mr. Osterley took off his hat with his left hand, passed his 
cart-whip over into the same, and with his right hand rubbed 
his right ear between thumb and finger. He looked down upon 
the ground, as if he kept some calculation hidden in the earth, 
and were consulting it. “ How many d’ y’ want 1 ” he asked 
lifting head and eyes suddenly. 

“ Whether I want them at all will depend upon the price,” 
said Rael, “ perhaps five thousand.” 

“Well, I ’ve got some, — ^ood. I’ll let y’ have ’em f’r 
three dollars an’ a quarter.” 

“ Then I don’t w’ant any,” answered Rael, with perfect pleas- 
antness. “ Good evening, Mr. Osterley.” And he gave the 
colt the hint with the reins, and the light buckboard rolled off 
along the soft, soundless road. Mr. Osterley was left standing 
with his ear in one hand and his hat and whip in the other, 
forgetting all three. He had posed himself, bodily and men- 
tally, for a long Yankee haggle. He expected, in the end, to 
sell his shaved cedars for about two-seventy-five, twenty-five 
cents, at that, more than they were absolutely worth ; and that 
Israel Heybrook would talk him leisurely down the extra fifty. 
He thought there would be just about time, between daylight 
and dark for that- And half the pleasure of selling anything, 
to Mr. Osterley and hundreds of his kind, is the slow approach 
to the bargain. But here w’as Israel Heybrook, off at tlie first 
jump. 

“ That is one thing,” Rael said to France, as they drove for- 


310 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


ward, “that somebody has got to begin to put right. I mean 
there shall be one man in Fellaiden who everybody shall know 
will name his own fair price, — I don’t say lowest, because 
there ought n’t to be a higher than the right, — at the first word, 
and who won’t pay hours and minutes, as well as dollars and 
cents, when he wants to buy. That man would have been glad 
to get two-sixty for his shingles. But I won’t chaffer. It ’s 
like tittle-tattle or a quarrel. Somebody ’s got to stop short, 
or there ’s no end to it.” 

France thought of the “ custom that was the law of life.” 

“ But won’t you have to run the gauntlet of all the people 
who have lumber to sell,” she asked, “ and come off, at last, 
without your shingles t ” 

“ Maybe, for once. In that case, I 'd put off my shingling job, 
and consider I ’d done better. If I begin young, I may come 
to be understood. Where I know what I can give or take, I 
won’t ask or oflfer twice.” 

There was an inflexibility about Israel Heybrook, that it 
would be hazardous to run against. 

France was set thinking things of him, silently, by those 
words. And she remembered them many times long after. 

Miss Ammah was on the west piazza when they reached 
home. Mr. Kingsworth was with her. He had come up this 
day from Boston, and had stopped here, on his way over from 
the village, with their letters, just as iisual. 

He met France with the smile that was always his first 
bright encounter with his friends ; it was as unhindered to-day 
as it had been that first day when he had found her here. 

Was that strange, did she think 1 Bernard Kingsworth was 
only “ acting out,” in this also, “ his word,” — the word that was 
a living thing in him ; not, even to himself, a pretence. Did 
she suppose he had been afraid for “ the hairs of his head,” all 
these weeks 1 that he had hidden himself, in that mere coward- 
liness 1 • 

There had been time for Miss Ammah to tell him that France 
had gone away this afternoon with Rael, to Crowned Head. 
There had been time for whatever question or thought of possi- 
bility might have come with this. Even yet, it had not driven 
him away or made him afraid. 


CROWNED HEAD. 


311 


Had not “ the Lord’s wish been in the midst of his wish ” ? 

Yes, in the very heart of it, he knew ; that which himself, 
even, had not penetrated to. Not in the outside way of it, yet ; 
perhaps it would never be. But the live depth of it was kept 
safe, somehow ; he never doubted that ; for he had heard and 
had taken to himself the word, “ Your heart shall live for- 
ever.” 

Is it strange to you, who read, as it may have been to 
France! Is this an anomalous, impossible man I tell you of? 
1 only tell you of one in whom was the grain, as a grain of mus- 
tard-seed ; and to such there is no mountain that cannot be 
lifted off, that the grain may grow up, strong and beautiful, 
into the light. 

Whether it be believed or not, I think it was truly more 
Bernard Kingsworth’s desire that the right thing should he, than 
that anything should come to pass in his own way or choosing. 
I think if there were an act of his — a staying or a going — 
that could have helped, or shunned to hinder, aught that might 
be coming, right across his own first seeking, to these other two, 
he would have gone upon its errand for them, or have stayed 
to smile as he had done to-day. 

Yet his feet might no less have felt the stones as he went; 
the pain, for long yet, might be no less under the smile. 

Miss Ammah had business letters, and she resolved to-night 
that she would go down next week. She might return to at- 
tend to her new business here ; but the thing in natural order 
was that she should go to Boston now. And the natural order 
was that France should go down with her. 

Miss Ammah Tredgold, also, did the right and obvious thing, 
and believed in the appointing of the order. 

There was only one especial word between France and Israel, 
the day 'that they said good-by. 

“ If I could only take a little bit of Fellaiden down there 
with me ! ” the girl had exclaimed, looking out on the morning 
among the hills for the last time. 

“ There is a little bit of Fellaiden gone down there before you,’^ 
Bael answered. “I wish you would look after Philip Merri- 
weather in any kind way you can. He is a fellow who will go 


812 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


with all his might for what seems to himself the best thing. 
And there are so many different bests, you know.” 

“I know,” said France, looking up in that brave, good face. 
“ And I will try.” 

She felt as if he had shared something of his best, most gen- 
erous self, with her, in telling her a thing like this to do. 

It was taking her friendship, her perfect understanding, her 
sameness of feeling, for granted, just as she would have him 
take them. 

Was there anything just a little too settled, and of course? 
Was there anything that had been passed by, given up, perhaps, 
on the ordinary road to such a sameness and understanding ? 

These questions might be coming to her by and by, when 
she should have plenty of time to be looking back, and think- 
ing all these things over. 


SAFEGUARDS. 


313 


.CHAPTER XXX. 

SAFEGUARDS. 

The three Miss Pyes had each a timidity. It was iuconvenient 
that there should have been these three individual forms to the 
family nervousness. If there had been but one, the family life 
could have been more easily and less restrictedly shaped in ac. 
cordance. As it was, they maintained, in certain quite unusual 
and laborious ways, a perpetual triple system of fortified, fire, 
precautionary, and meteorological defences. You will infer that 
the three terrors were of burglary, conflagration, and tempest. 

Miss Charity, in opposition to the spirit of her christening, 
looked upon mankind as a race of thieves, upon the gentle peace 
and shadow of night-time as a misguided ordination of Provi- 
dence, which simply sheltered the infernal side of human pro- 
pensity and procedure. She slept with a revolver between her 
piUows, but not the pillows that were under her head. It was 
a case constructed expressly for the safe keeping of the weapon, 
of which she stood only in less dread than of the robbers. It 
was, in fact, two pillows, stoutly stuffed, sewed together at the 
sides, and shrouded in one round cover like a muff. The muff 
stood upright at her bed-head, the pistol was thrust in at the 
the upper end, the muzzle of the fire-arm pointed downward 
through the floor. Nobody could be hit by it, should the ball 
go off in that position, and pass unspent through board and 
plaster, unless such person, neither rationally nor rightly posed 
or disposed, were standing precisely on the top of the Stewart 
stove in the hall-alcove below^ 

Miss Charity had also invented an alarm of her own, in the 
connection, by certain wires which crossed various probable 
points of a predatory passage, — such as the china-and- silver- 
closet door, the heads and foots of staircases, etc., — with 


314 


ODD, OE EVEK ? 


another equally ingenious adaptation of the hot-air passages of 
a disused furnace, which comnaunicated through floors and 
partition walls with each story of the dwelling. 

The Pyes abjured furnaces. The late Captain Pye had re- 
sisted them, and inculcated the principle of resistance in his 
family. They ate up the air ; they were sure to burn the 
house down, which fell in with Miss Bab’s particular horror; 
and they needed the further provision of a coal-mine in profit- 
able operation under the cellar-floor, to keep them in blast. So 
Miss Pye had utilized two or three of the flues in this manner : 
she had had the pipes refitted, and caused light wire nettings to 
be arranged within and across the register-mouths, held by a hinge 
on one side, and a loose pin upon the other. Upon every one 
of these she kept piled a small cairn of old croquet balls, col- 
lected from her friends, though not to the same extent, as some 
people collect postage-stamps. The wdres, latched invisibly 
across door or stairway, and caiTied, after the manner of bell- 
hanging, to the pin heads, let fall, if run against, the nettings ; 
consequently, a shattering avalanche, that crashed down with 
awful and enveloping sound, as if the moment’s mean little 
iniquity had been the last exceeding toiich that overpoised the 
equilibrium of the universe, and the wreck of matter had be- 
gun. If you ever dropped a thimble or a penny down a register- 
pipe, you can estimate what would be the multiplication of the 
marvellous reverberation by the force and spherical quantity of 
a dozen or two hardwood balls bounding and plunging along 
the ringing tunnels from either or both upper floors to the cel- 
lar. If it did n’t drive the interlopers out in disorder, where 
the six barrels could finish them comfortably, they must be less 
susceptible to quakings than brave Mother Earth herself. As, 
however, there were also precautions in the way of iron lattices 
or bolted inner shutters to all the lower wundows, and a kind 
of toll-bar against every inward-opening door, which was lifted 
nightly into sockets across it, there had been, in fifteen years, 
but two occasions when this local convulsion had startled the 
household. One, when Miss Mag, indifferent to fire or thieves, 
but quick to the first mutter of distant thunder or a roar of 
wind in the chimney, had been waked by a flash of April light- 


SAFEGUARDS. 


315 


ning, and set off impetuously to fetch her silken thunder-robe 
from a far closet across a bit of landing to which an up and a 
down half flight of stairway led ; and it had been a mere mercy, 
through a desperate clutch at the baluster, that she, as well as 
the balls, had not gone from the top of the house to the bot- 
tom unnoticed in the general crash. The other, when Miss 
Barbara, reckless of tempest or trespassers, but sniffing con- 
tinually remote and impossible odors of burning, had gone 
forth, in a like midnight manner, upon a smelling quest. But as 
Miss Barbara moved heavily and slowly, — without a light to 
the surer discovery of smouldering sparks, and fending before 
her with her bent arm, — she had simply sprung the trap, and 
sat down, safe and confounded, upon the landing floor. 

Miss Barbara kept matches in a stone jar, with a heavy top, 
in a locked cupboard. She dealt them out, broken carefully 
single, three nightly, to kitchen and each bedroom, in covered 
tin boxes, — requiring of everybody, from guest to servant, that 
the burned ones should be replaced in the same ; and every 
morning she investigated and counted up. She interfered se- 
riously with Miss Chat, who was equally anxious to reconnoitre 
her wire lines the last thing, by insisting on creeping about to 
have the last sniff and peep herself wherever a light had been. 
She kept a row of her father’s old ship-buckets in either hall 
and across the kitchen, painted a flame-red, that might of itself 
have given a sudden panic to unaccustomed eyes ; and she had 
a big bell hung in what the captain had called the “ cupelow.” 
Miss Mag had rebelled against this, as destroying with its ugly 
bulk and trailing rope the prettiness, and almost the availa- 
bility as a resort, of the nice little octagon belvidere, to say 
nothing of the danger of its diverting an entire bolt of light- 
ning away from the rods right into the house ; but as an aux- 
iliary to the other uproar in case of an invasion, it carried the 
vote by two to one, and was established. 

Miss Mag, on her part, gradually instituted these things : 
her thunder-gown of black silk with a large hood, that would 
envelop her whole person ; a most bristling and elaborate 
system of conductors upon the house, superintended in their 
erection by herself, with a scientific treatise on thunder-storms 


316 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


in her hand, and a professed practical electrician at her elbow, 
the rods carried out like iron roots in every direction under- 
ground from the building, terminating in cistern, well, and 
drains; an arched cellar-chamber, cleared of barrels and old 
iron, for retreat in tornadoes ; and a couple of supernumerary 
feather-beds, stowed with intent and foresight in a closet, where 
Miss Mag had actually been known to betake herself in a hot 
summer night, and plant herself, as Miss Charity did the pistol, 
only with muzzle uppermost, to bide and breathe as she might 
until a heavy shower had passed. 

The three ladies had lived without male protection ever since 
their father’s death. Now and then. Miss Charity, the only one 
apprehensive in a direction in which masculine support could 
be supposed of much avail, had mooted the desirability of 
adding to their establishment in some relation, either of friend 
or servant, one of the class that, according to her anthropology, 
consisted of but two orders, — rascals or complimentarily or- 
dained catchers of rascals. But the uncertainty lest she might 
stumble upon the wrong natural division, added to the remon- 
strance of Miss Barbara, who knew he would be smoking in his 
bedroom and carrying matches by the gross in his pockets and 
leaving candles burning in a draught with the curtains blowing 
in, and to Miss Mag’s objection that some of them were still 
young enough for a friend to seem questionable, and a servant 
would be a perfect fifth wheel in the daytime, and never wake 
up if he was wanted in the night, had kept the idea chaotic. 

This very early autumn, however, of which I am writing, an 
occurrence befell which brought it out of the vagueness of sug- 
gestion into the force of direct and pressing question. 

One lovely September night, fair with stars and a low moon 
in the west, when the lights in the house had been extinguished, 
and the three ladies and their serving-woman, whose early habits 
were well known, had been for some three hours sleeping be- 
hind their bars and hurdles in the usual quiet, the thing hap- 
pened which might have left Miss Charity with a sense of 
wasted life and capacity if it never had happened. Their house 
was entered. 

Entered in the meanest underground way, through a cellar 


SAFEGUARDS. 


317 

hatchway, where a load of wood had been thrown in late in the 
afternoon, and the covers closed down upon it, so that access 
from below, to draw the bolts, had been impossible. When 
Miss Charity asked her servant, as usual, if the bolting had been 
done, the girl had answered, “ No’m. But no created creechur 
could get in through them three cords of wood. And the stair- 
way-door is both locked and hooked and wired and tabled.” So 
they went to bed in peace. 

By midnight, full one cord of that wood lay carefully strewn 
upon the soft outside grass; a pathway downward had been 
made, and the hatchway doors folded back, and “ left ^' — as Miss 
Pye observed, as if the care of fastening up after himself might 
be expected from a sneak thief, — in such a breadth of invita- 
tion that “ there might have been a steady stream of them 
pouring in afterwards till daylight.” This statement, however, 
anticipates the after-investigation. 

It was about quarter past twelve, when Miss Charity first 
thought she detected a faint, indefinite disturbance, and rising, 
began her familiar, tiptoe, hearkening round, in the safety of 
her own chamber, from door to door, and window to window. 
She could see nothing, for her room was not on the hatchway 
side ; but her sensitive, long-trained organs discerned, among 
the throbbing silences of the night, a motion, — dead footfalls, 
somewhere, upon dead ground. Every perception in her was 
alive to a kind of odylic consciousness, in which she would have 
had a sense of a night-bird’s shoot through the air or a field 
mouse’s rustle through a grass-patch. She was sure she had 
been aware of that muffled stir, that vibration of some live 
doing, in the house away beneath. She felt, now, rather 
than heard, that some one — some thing — was going, carefully 
and weightily, along upon the ground outside, within the 
premises. There was a smothered rumble. If it had been 
Mag that heard it, it would have whispered to her, unmistaka- 
bly, “ Earthquake ! ” But earthquake was not in Miss Char- 
ity’s department, only the still, small human sound. She 
put on her gray flannel gown, — her feet were already in her 
bedside slippers, — drew with much distant caution her pistol 
from its feather holster, opened the door into the east passage, 


318 


ODD, OR EVEN? 

and crossed it to Miss Barbara’s room. Bab never locked her 
door, lest, as in a story she had read, the key should drop out 
of the key-hole with her agitation in case of fire, and she 
should be left groping for it on the carpet while the hot smoke 
should rush in and suffocate her. 

“Pshaw!” said Miss Barbara, from under the bedclothes; 
and twisted herself over with indignant determination to 
sleep on. 

“ There ’s somebody here 1 ” Miss Charity enunciated in a 
slow, awful whisper, and with a tone like the announcing of 
disbelieved doom to a sceptic. 

“Five -hundred -and -forty -ninth time,” as slowly rejoined 
Miss Barbara, in a monotone, through lips that evidently re- 
fused to more than part, lest their motion should arouse other 
bodily activities. 

“ There ’ve been five hundred and forty-nine wheelbarrows, 
then, with five hundred and forty-nine tubs of butter and hams 
and salt fishes and beef roasts, and whatever else was down 
in the refrigerator room, — and men wheeling them straight 
along from the cellar corner to the front wall,” retorted Miss 
Chat, more rapidly, but in the sublime calmness of the realized 
worst that had long been looked for, — “for that’s what I see 
this identical minute, from this window, and am — going — to 
fire at ! ” 

But to fire she had to raise the window, at which sound the 
man dropped his wheelbarrow handles and flung himself in- 
stantly behind a huge, low-spreading Norway spruce, where he 
lay flat upon the ground. Miss Charity, with the utmost 
method, but with averted head, stretched forth her weapon, 
fired, and cocked and fired again; one, — click, — two, — click, 
- — and so on, six several times, at nothing in particular. 

At the end of the exercise, the marauder — five hundred and 
forty-ninth of imagination and first of reality — stepped 
serenely forth into the soft, clear light, resumed his wheeling, 
and cut boldly across the gravel-sweep before the assembled 
faces — for four women were looking out now, over each other’s 
heads — to the regular entrance, and thence down the shaded 
streetway below the heavy hedge. A few paces off, they heard 


SAFEGUAKDS. 319 

the load hastily tumbled into a wagon, and this driven reck' 
lessly down hill and away. 

The nearest neighbors, a furlong or more off the other side, 
alarmed by the shots, hurried, on foot, with inquiry and assist- 
ance. Meanwhile, the bell was rung and the catapults were 
discharged. People rushed in, breathless. The three sisters 
were in their long-premeditated array for night-sally, — namely, 
three gray dressing-gowns and three full-plaited round muslin 
caps, — and the servant-maid in what she could catch up, which 
was an afghan and a towel ; and a procession was instituted 
around and through the precincts, resulting in the discovery of 
the open entrance I have described, the wheelbarrow tracks 
across the lawn, the wheelbarrow itself, borrowed from the shed, 
its wheel well greased, and left behind upon the roadside, — and 
precisely the articles missing which Miss Chat, with presence of 
mind that would pass into a tradition, had enumerated. 

The last scathe and scorch of rebuke had fallen upon Miss 
Barbara for her contemptuous doubts, when she saw the burned 
ends of dozens of matches lying scattered upon shelf and floor, 
and on the very wood-pile, by whose light the prowling plun- 
derer had found his way and made research for his spoil. 
From that hour, her midnight anxieties joined themselves, 
inseparably, to those of Miss Charity, and went — offensa et 
defensa — hand in hand. 

Not to make too long an episode of an occurrence which was 
an epoch only in the Pye family, and is of the merest incidental 
consequence to our story, we have only to make the connecting 
link by noting that the horror was in its early delicious retro- 
spect, bringing in its first returns of that enjoyment which was 
to be as a life annuity now, for which the sum of one night’s 
agitation and loss had been well paid in, when Miss Ammah 
and France Everidge came down from Fellaiden; and that it 
was in an early call at the Nest that Miss Mag rehearsed to 
the latter, in her most graphic style, what “Chat and Bab 
and I” had endured and said and done on the occasion. For 
it was to be observed that, although it was Miss Chat’s especial 
estate that had come in, so to speak, and the other sisters — to 
resort to slang — had never taken stock in it, — these other two 


320 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


were concedingly ready, now, to help appropriate its dividends 
of honor; as, to do them justice, they would, on the other 
hand, have shared nobly whatever might have fallen more 
directly to their own credit in the way of burning up or blast- 
ing down, 

“And so,” wound up Miss Mag, “ we all say now, — Chat and 
Bab and I, — that before the long winter nights come, and we 
lay in our coal and our vegetables, and our kindlings and our 
butter, and our apples and our salt meats, we really must have 
a man in the house. And because if we had anybody of any 
kind of an age suitable to any of ours it would n’t be suitable 
at all, you know, we think it had better be a boy. At least, 
not a child , — of course; just more than you could exactly call 
a boy, but might say a young fellow, that would have come to 
size and strength, but not to misconstruction. And — well. Chat, 
perhaps you ’d better explain the rest.” 

“ My sister means, I suppose,” said Miss Chat, in the clear, 
common-sense way that she especially affected upon business, 
“what we have talked over among ourselves as to arrange- 
ments. There is n’t anybody we would quite care to invite, 
or that would wish, probably, to be invited ; and it would make 
things more comfortable and independent on all sides, if some 
moderate equivalent were taken. We have no occasion to make 
money, — that way.” 

“No,” put in Miss Bab, who always did put in the key-word 
and fact, “we only want what will even the accounts. For 
we don’t quite feel like extra spending, you see. The truth is, 
we ’ve locked up a pretty good amount lately, that we shall 
have to wait for till it pays in ; and it does n’t leave us any- 
thing — this year — to spare.” 

The little grandeur of manner with which Miss Bab measured 
her sentence, and left a possible magnificence of disclosure to 
another year or day, was lost, for the moment, on Fi’ance, 
whose mind shot instantly to that “ little piece of Fellaiden ” 
she was commissioned and promised to take kind thought for. 
It would be a good thing for Phil Merriweather, — a most safe 
and excellent thing, — if from the wide range and irresponsibil- 
ity of the life in the great city upon which he was just loosed, 


SAFEGUARDS. 


321 


he could come out here upon his gentlemauhood, to take trust 
and charge with these good, simple ladies. Miss Chat’s next 
words fixed themselves to what was in her mind, and so brought 
her mind to the perception she had been missing. 

“ A young man with business in the city would be what we 
should like, for several reasons. It would be out of the ques- 
tion having him about, or in and out, all day long,” she said. 
“ But a bright young fellow, — coming home at night to bring 
us the news, and word of how things were going ; and perhaps 
now and then to look into a little matter for us, that w'omen 
can’t be on the exchange to look after for themselves,” — here 
Miss Chat pushed up a completed knot, and shifted the threads 
of her macram4, and took an air with her head of that large, 
reticent dignity which seemed to be just now running through 
the family, — “ would exactly answer our idea. And if six dol- 
lars a week would answer his, — with his mending looked to a 
little when his things came home, because I could n’t face my 
conscience in putting a pile of holey socks into a man’s drawer, 
and three of us here of the sewing kind ; especially if he kept 
that little eye on the market that we might know better 
whether to sell out or hold on, — only for that he must be smart 
and comprehending, — just any kind of an image in pantaloons 
would n’t be worth while, you see ! And Miss Chat concluded 
her sentence, quite unconscious that she had left her premise 
waiting lamely, far behind for a forgotten consequent. 

“ I think I know, — it is possible, — I might mention it. My 
father has a young man of that sort just come into his employ. 
But, dear Miss Chat, I don’t mean to ask ; only isn’t the market 
dangerous for women ] ” 

“ That ’s what your father says, I know,” returned Miss 
Chat, with superiority that had a remote, delicate flavor of 
resentment. “ Men think a good many things are dangerous 
for women. But there ’s an old saying about the goose and 
the gander ; and maybe it ’s sometimes true turned round ! ” 

France could not push inquiry ; but she went home with two 
questions in her mind to ask her father. What he had ever 
said to Miss Charity Pye about investments 1 and. What sort of 
a home, if he knew, Philip Merriweather had got in the cityl 

21 


322 


ODD, OK EVEN? 


To the first, — “ Miss Pye had come to him last spring about 
raining stocks,” he said. “ Somebody had put it into her head 
that I was interested in them, and that everybody was making 
fortunes in them. But I advised her out of it.” 

“Are you surel” France asked with anxiety. “Because 
they say they have locked up money somewhere, and have n’t 
all they usually have to spend.” 

“ I gave her the best of my judgment,” he answered hastily. 

France did not say anything to that. The thought that 
arose in her mind was, “ Not the judgment you used for your- 
self, papa ! ” But that would be disrespectful, and she did not 
say it. 

“ Women ought to know when they are well off ! ” Mr. Ever- 
idge exclaimed, with impatience. “ They ’ve no business iu 
among the wheels ! Those girls had their money all in safe old 
limited stocks, and seven per cent company mortgages. If they’ve 
been risking in fancies, they ’ll just as sure come out shorn — ” 

“ Perhaps they have n’t. I ’ve no right to say so. Only they 
spoke, I thought, — it was but a few words, — as if they had in- 
convenienced themselves just now, but as if they expected some 
great thing of it, by and by. What they really talked about, 
was having some young man in the house this winter, for 
protection. And I thought of Philip Merriweather. Where is 
he now, papal Would n’t it be good for him 1 ” 

Papa was a little bit cross. He was beginning to find his 
neighbor too much for him. 

“ I don’t see, France, why you need to trouble yourself about 
this young man,” he said. 

Those words, “ young man,” were pronounced as they only 
are in giving a check to a young woman. There is nothing 
like that kind of check for putting a woman, young or old, 
aside with ; and all the father, brother, and husband-folk know 
it right well. But there is a counter-check, — the conscious or 
unconscious fact, concerning some one out-of-the-present-ques- 
tion person, which sets a woman triumphant and superior above 
all hint or mention of any of the world’s other hundreds of 
millions. Mr. Everidge might as well have said, “ I don’t see, 
France, that you have afny need to trouble yourself about that 


SAFEGUARDS. 


323 


pen-rack,” in which at the moment, as they sat by the library 
table, she was carefully rearranging the pens and pencils that 
had been shaken from their rests by the newspaper he had just 
thrown by. France went silently on with her work. 

“ I like to see things — and people — in proper, safe places,” 
she said. “ And I promised some of Phil’s friends that I would 
have a thought for him. He is a youth who will take vehe- 
mently to whatever he thinks is best worth while ; and I sup- 
pose he may be easily mistaken on that point.” 

As she quietly re-presented Rael Heybrook’s word, when at 
Rael Heybrook’s name she would have had enough to do to 
take care of her self-possession, she might have been a hundred 
grandmothers for her absolute outgrownness of any girlish im- 
plication as to “young men.” 

“ So you propose to take him in hand ? Is that it 1 ” Mr. 
Evei’idge spoke half with his first slight irony, and half with a 
new amusement at the tone the girl was assuming. 

She answered with the entirest gravity. “ Yes, papa ; that 
is what I mean to do, in a way, if I can. Some of us are 
responsible, I think, now that he has come down out of that 
simple Fellaiden life to work for you. Won’t the best way be, 
perhaps, for you to ask him out here some day 1 Then I could 
talk with him ; and I don’t see exactly how else I could man- 
age it.” 

“ I should think so ! But how are you, or I, going to pick 
out Phil Merriweather from the rest for our especial devotion 1 
There are all the other clerks and shippers, why hel And 
here are your mother and the girls ” — Euphemia and Helen 
were “ the girls,” the little ones were “ the children,” Fran’ 
was always just “ Fran’.” — “ What will they say 1 ” 

“ It will be you who will say, if you think right, papa. And 
I don’t know about the others, the clerks and the shippers, at 
present; I only do know about Phil. Where is he living 
now 1 ” 

“ Somewhere at the South End, I believe. I ’ve no doubt 
he ’s found a comfortable place ; he seems satisfied. And he 
works well. I have my eye on him, and I think he ’ll do.” 

“ Anyhow, I should like to see him. Because I ’ve promised 
his friends.” 


324 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 

“Some of us are responsible.” Those words of France’s 
remained in Mr. Everidge’s mind. And something, just the 
least look, in Phil Merriweather’s eyes the next morning, as if 
they had had too much and too late gaslight, struck the mer- 
chant’s quickened observation of the boy, and underscored those 
words. 

“ I can’t undertake to stand between them all and all Boston,” 
he thought, with a certain resentful impatience. Neverthe- 
less, the impatience had now to be with something that had 
beg\in to be alive in his own mind. It was not anybody’s 
saying, that might be forgotten. It had begun to say itself. 

So one day, before the week was over, he did ask Philip Mer- 
riweather to come out to his place and see what the country 
was like about Boston. “ My daughter thinks you may be 
missing the hills and home,” he said ; “ and I believe she has 
something to speak to you about. We dine at five.” 

There was a certain distance in the very ease of that way of 
putting it. There was nothing to hold back from. All there 
could be of approach or mutual concern was set forth at once. 
My daughter had something to speak about. She might have 
had that with a mechanic. The mechanic would have been sent 
to the door only ; 'Flip was to go in and have something to eat : 
things were just as definite in the one case as in the other, 
however. 

There was a train at 3.15, which the merchant often took, 
and took to-day. There was another at 4.20, by which the 
clerk would have barely time to render himself ; and he was 
left, naturally, for he was on the wharf with a bill of lading 
when Mr. Everidge went up town, to get through his work, 
change his dress hurriedly at his boarding-house, and follow. 

France found a difference in Flip Merri weather ; something 
was gone out of his merry audacity already. He did not look 
at her now as he would have looked at a bird in a tree, or any 
other beautiful, free thing that was safely enough away from 
him, perhaps, and plumed as he could not be ; but that, yet, 
he was on the same plane of freedom with in his own way. 
He did not look as he had looked among the hills. He was 
toned down ; or he took a tone lower, involuntarily, in her 
presence. 


SAFEGUARDS. 


325 


It was not the realizing of differences that he had not known 
of while he only knew the hills and the hill-people ; there had 
been differences enough there; and as soon as Flip Merri- 
weather realized a new or broader thing, he realized himself 
directly into it, not aside from it, potentially, at least. 

Still less was it awkwardness. He showed unusedness, per- 
haps ; but it was a very alert and capable unusedness, that only 
wanted, and did not miss, the cue. With his quick adaptability 
he had not been a month in a city boarding-house even, with- 
out catching certain externalities which are a great deal more 
generally learned and adopted than the fenced-in few suppose, 
and are the last things, now, really to distinguish anybody, 
whatever the Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table may have found 
true, or have reordered by his ukase, twenty years ago. Our 
young fellow, Phil, said neither “How” nor “Yes” interroga- 
tively, now. He had dropped these easily enough, and picked 
up glibly enough the current, “ 1 beg your pardon 1 ” and “ Is 
that so 1 ” which, without essential superiority, correspond. He 
had soon observed that a dinner-fork is not ordinarily held or 
managed like a pitch-fork ; and that coffee-cups have the sugges- 
tiveness of handles, and do not need the embrace of three fingers 
and a dip of a fourth. He had learned to break bread before 
spreading it, and to dispose of solid food before taking in liquid ; 
also the grace and comfort of a touch of a napkin between the 
two. He was guilty of no gaucherie at the Everidge dinner- 
table. 

But when France sat down to talk with him afterward, left 
to her as he was by the elder ladies of the family, she saw then 
that not an ignorance, but a knowledge made the boy conscious 
before her, and took down his mountain boldness. Some touch 
of the world had taught him, as it taught Adam in Eden, to 
turn shamefaced. It was time already she felt, without dis- 
tinctly discerning why, that her errand had come to him. 

She had the quick, heavenly wisdom to move straight upon 
the truth. She told him what she wanted of him, then she 
said, “ It will be best for you too, Philip. I do not think it 
can be good to come straight from those pure hills into the 
thick of city living. The air tastes bad.” 


326 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


And her clear girl’s eyes — clear to the element of the thing, 
but pure and xxnconscious of particular — turned themselves 
full into his. They reached through to the best of him, like the 
sword of the spirit. They came in time, while the bad air did 
after all still taste bad. 

He thanked her in very meek fashion for Flip Merriweather 
of the Thumble-Side, said it was good of her to think of him, 
and that he would be glad to go and see ; taking his hat as she 
asked him to do, and walking with her down the hill to the 
Pyes’ Nest, as Tobias went with the angel. 

It was quickly settled. Flip, good-looking, boy -young and 
man-strong, fresh and keen in business ways and wideawakeness, 
to be away all day and home by eleven at night at the very 
latest times, “ which he would n’t care about often,” he said 
under the pure blade-flash of the angel eyes, and in Mr. Everidge’s 
employ, with France to especially indorse and befriend him, 
was exactly what the Miss Pyes had figured among themselves. 
On the other hand, the Pyes’ Nest, with its quaint, pretty 
ordering, and Misses Chat and Bab and Mag, with their home- 
like patter of kind talk and the fun that he could see in them, 
the gable-room they showed him, that looked out upon a bit of 
the river and a turn of the railway just before it reached the 
border of the village whence it made his ready link with town, 
and a peep in passing at the exquisite ready-laid tea-table, in 
whose appointments the maiden sisters were curiously nice and 
fanciful, — to the flare of a teacup-rim or the turn of a smug 
little creampot, — just took the fancy of the boy from the farms, 
to whom they opened pass for him right into a life that the 
South-End boarding-house was far away outside of. 

“ And you will soon not be a stranger here, and you will have 
us to come and see,” France said, very sweet and sisterly. And 
so the agreement was made : a week after Flip came out with 
his valise-trunk to the Nest, and things that they did not ex- 
actly take into account were more closely linked together than 
any of them knew. 


BOLTS AND BONDS. 


327 


CHAPTER XXXI. 

BOLTS AND BONDS. 

We must go back into the summer, — into the day on which 
Sarell had been borrowed for the exigencies at East Hollow, 
leaving those of Hey brook Farmhouse to fare as they might. 
She had come away with Hollis Bassett, under the mild regret- 
ful sufferance of Mother Heybrook’s parting glance, and the 
condemnation of Israel’s cold shoulder. She wondei’ed proudly 
and mutely if some time they would n’t know better ; know 
whether she had counted this bit of her life dear unto herself ; 
whether, in her loyal desertion, she had not been braver than if 
she had stood by. 

The very climax and break of the whole hot thunder-breed- 
ing season came in the tempest of that afternoon. East Hollow 
lay straight in its path ; straight in the range from Sudley 
slopes to the south valley. 

It grew dark in the low-ceiled farmhouse. Mother Pemble 
could scarcely see to count the stitches in her new quilt-stripe. 
Uncle Amb was rather feeling his way among his familiar 
bundles of papers in the old secretary than examining them or 
deciphering their written indorsements. He was looking for a 
certain parcel that he knew of geographically by its location in 
division and pigeon-hole ; specifically by feel and complexion, 
and the grouping of the labelling lines across the corner of its 
outward wrap. 

Every once in a while, with varying impulse regarding the 
affairs the papers represented, according as his moods of con- 
science or of self-seeking got the uppermost, he had been used 
to draw forth the file and carefully restudy the documents, 
even the far-back document of all, as if by any new searching 
of familiar word and phrase new aspect might be given either 
to his obligation or his prolonged evasion. This was not so 


328 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


very strange a play of human nature : men search the Sacred 
and Immutable Word itself, as if with some such vague and 
blind expectance. 

There lay the old bond, then, cancelled long ago in the court 
records, but of which he had kept this copy, — a life in itself 
looking forth at him if ever he half turned to destroy it, which 
would not let him take its evidence away. Perhaps he was 
afraid, in that part of him which recognized a truth and justice 
with which sooner or later he must make himself at one or be 
eternally condemned, to put away the kind of external con- 
science that it was to him, lest by the sign he put away also 
the inner sense that was the spirit of God ; the sense that kept 
him from altogether letting go the original fact as past and done 
with, and sliding into an established acceptance of the resulting 
situation as a mere “ unfort’nitness ” which he and his half- 
brother had somehow fallen into together, and which together 
they had simply got to bear ; the latter the more easily of the 
two, because he had his boys and his brisk wife to help him, 
while Deacon Amb had only himself, “an’ all them wimmen- 
folks a hangin’ on to him.” Truly, in his ordinary conscious- 
ness, this was almost the way, if he had defined it, that it had 
come to look to him ; even, at times, — especially paying times, 
— as if the main misfortune had been Welcome’s own, in which 
he had become implicated. Yet something, back of himself, 
had kept him, all the while, from an act that should seem to 
abnegate, or release him from, the truth. He did not mean, in 
the long end, to violate or defy this inmost of him ; in other 
words, to lose his own soul. 

“ Ef he should be spared to them ninety-nine years an’ a 
week, an’ be prospered,” — that was what he had always said to 
himself, or to the overhearing Providence, holding on to it as 
the leading phrase and condition of the contract, — then, long 
before he went to his great account, he should settle this small 
one squarely with his half-brother ; although, indeed, there was 
a proviso by which he felt Providence was doubly secured, and 
a way of escape by the same loop left open for that conscience 
of justice in himself : if things did happen otherwise, the law 
would turn over to Welcome, or Ms boys, what would more 


BOLTS AND BONDS. 


829 


than make it good ; seeing that there was no child here, nor 
any closer kin ] and he never meant to make a will. Care’line 
had the farm j and her halves of whatever else there might 
be would be all she had any right to look for. No ; Mother 
Pemble might watch and hint and hector ; but he never 
meant to make a will. 

With the bond were tied up all accounts, receipts, etc., that 
there had ever been between the two men, of other and more 
ordinary nature ; also the memorandums of the sums “ ad- 
vanced ” from time to time to Welcome Hey brook, since that 
interest-paying on the mortgage had been going on. The 
balances by which Heybrook had made up the payments, or the 
quarterly amounts he had often been obliged to furnish wholly 
by himself, had been scored only mentally, with the accompa- 
nying honest intentions ; being always easily arrived at in these 
lookings-over of the record, by the simple subtraction of the 
loans from the aggregate of the regular percentage. Ambrose 
did not like to put too many items in open black and white. 

During the last year the deacon had been in less danger of 
slipping into that fatal ease of conscience against which the 
bond stood as reminder. There w’ere other things, now, to 
keep him from forgetting, and from feeling too comfortable in 
the suspension of the claims he was so virtuous in not repudiat- 
ing. They were the things, in short, that moved him at the 
present moment to the revolving of certain plans and devices 
from which should be a beginning — kinky and crooked, to be 
sure, and returning upon themselves — of the magnanimous 
final restitution. But we will take him up where he sits, now, 
at the old secretary, in the thunderous gloom of the August 
afternoon. 

^ The heavy cloud, rolling down over Sudley Woods, spreading 
above the Centre basin, and gathered again before the great 
rush of the wind that compressed and drove it between the 
towering mountain-spurs below, hung close with its massive 
drift above the Hollow Farm and its neighborhood. It grew 
darker and darker. 

Mother Pemble dropped her knitting-work, with its steel 
needles, into the wide bag at her bedside, pushed a pillow down 


330 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


between her and it, and lay back with hands piously folded 
Uncle A mb fumbled on at his papers. 

“ How you ken set there, with all them brass handles an’ 
ornimints, an’ them three sharp knobs a pintin’ up overhead, 
an’ all them keys a-danglin’ at y’r elber, it passes me t’ know !” 
apostrophized Mother Pemble. One would think her tenderly 
solicitous for the deacon’s safety ; but however that may have 
been, she at least did not w'ant him sent for, then and there, 
before her eyes, by any sudden, visible dispensation. “ It ’s a 
temptin’ o’ Providunce,” she said. 

^‘That don’t tempt it,” the deacon answered with assurance. 
“ Providunce ain't a dunce. We sh’ll all be called when our times 
come, an’ not a minute afore.” 

In his limited apprehension, he partly and dimly conceived 
that the Overruling Power might be in some measure persuaded 
by this frank crediting of Its Wisdom, — partly held real under- 
lying confidence in that time of his as comfortably fixed, — and 
greatly relied, at the actual moment, upon being so righteously 
employed as in the very business of the Just Dealer. “ Heirs 
and assigns.” Those were the words that were running through 
his mind as he turned over slowly the docketed files. 

The heirs and assigns of Ambrose Newell, in the old trust 
deed ; the heirs and assigns of Welcome Heybrook, in the old 
trustee bond. How, even in the statutes of men, it was pro- 
vided that the acts of the fathers should be binding upon the 
children, and that the children should pay the penalties ! 

That they should avenge the rights, also. 

Ambrose Newell, childless old man, had these sons of Weh 
come’s, heirs to them both now, to deal with. They did not 
come into the instrument except as heirs. He had no con- 
sciousness of how it had stood between them and the life they 
might have chosen ; of any inheritance or right which he, 
through it, had already robbed them of. 

But they were to be dealt with now. Those boys had come 
to the front. Those boys had suddenly turned into men ; had 
taken upon themselves family interests and responsibilities, and 
understood, now, from the bottom, he had every reason to sup- 
pose, family ftffairs and history. In the first years of the 


BOLTS AND BONDS. 


831 


difl&culty that liad come upon their father, — when their mother 
took to entertaining summer boarders, and so kept them at 
their studies a while longer, — they only knew of it as “an 
obligation father had signed away back years ago, for Uncle 
Amb ; and that had come down upon him through Uncle Amlfs 
losing money.” They knew the farm was mortgaged and inter- 
est had to be paid ; that in consequence Lyman could not go on 
fitting for college, or Israel finish his four years at the Boston 
Institute, and then go to Germany. From being “ forehanded,” 
and able to plan great things scarcely before heard of among 
the simple farm folk, they had to come back to hard work and 
close management and plain prospects. But they naturally, 
as time went on, found out the why, and the condition and the 
extent of their hindrance. The result was — especially with 
the proud, silent Rael — a deep contempt of their uncle, the 
meek deacon, which the latter realized in a certain quiet, abso- 
lute avoidance, and by and by in a withdrawal of any business 
reference to himself on the father’s part, who ceased to come to 
him for help to meet those quarterly “li’bilities.” For six 
three-monthly returns of interest-day no item had been added 
to that memorandum of “ advances.” When he ventured to 
approach the subject inquiringly with Welcome, he had been 
briefly and gravely answered, “My boys have taken it in 
hand.” 

“ Well, ” the deacon had returned sheepishly and hesitat- 
ingly to that, “ ef they want any help abaout it, ye know ” — 

“They won’t,” interrupted Mr. Heybrook in the same short, 
staid way, “ not ’ntell ye c’n help ’em left the prenc'p'l.” 

That lay with a weight on the deacon’s mind. His time did 
not look so long or so sure to him. The question of demand 
and exposure was shifted. It rested now with these boys, 
one of them already a stern, upright man. He would not 
like to have Israel Heybrook come to him with the old quiet 
interrogatory of his father, “ Have n’t you anything to settle 
it with 1 ” 

Uncle Amb had drawn forth from a big wallet, one after 
another, three of those crisp, crackling documents, the merest 
rustle of which went straight along all Mother Pemble’s nerves, 


332 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


as over the wires of a telephone. He had laid them in the open 
middle compartment of the desk between the pigeon-holes, then 
he had begun searching out the old deeds and accounts. 

He had been into Hawksbury the day before, and had had a 
long talk with Squire Puttenhain. 

At this very moment. Squire Puttenham, who had manifested 
no haste yesterday to conclude the matter inquired of and sug- 
gested in their interview, w'as struggling slowly along on his 
lean sorrel nag against the swelling rush of the coming tem- 
pest, up the ascent from the South Thumble Valley. 

He was almost at the turn where the meadow road came down 
by a short crossway this side. There he would be comparatively 
sheltered, and a few minutes would bring him to East Hollow. 
He was accounting to the deacon, in mental rehearsal, for his seem- 
ing urgency. “The cloud wasn’t in sight when I left Hawks- 
bury,” he said. “And I had business over to East Centre. 
Thought I ’d look in here, an’ finally had to.” But not a word 
of all that did he repeat when he got to the deacon’s door. 

Uncle Amb sat at length with the papers in his hand that he 
had need of. But it was too dark in the low room to read 
them now, until the cloud should have passed. He laid them 
back with those other clean, crisp sheets into the wide middle 
compartment of the secretary, closed the rolling front, took the 
keys in his hand, and then, before locking the desk to leave it 
for the compulsory interval, he rose from his seat, and stood by 
the front window beyond it, to look out upon the storm and 
judge of its probable duration. 

At the instant, a roar and rush descended upon the hollow 
from the black north, — a hurtling sound, as great, jagged ice- 
fragments came down in fierce discharge before the blast, shoot- 
ing in oblique, deadly lines upon the harvest fields. They beat 
upon the long slant of the farmhouse roof like hammei-s. The 
glass lights of dairy and shed-room began to shiver in upon the 
floors. That lasted scarcely for two minutes. If it had gone 
on for ten, the gi’ain would have been ground in its sheaths, 
and the old shingles wmuld have been riddled as by bullets. 

It paused as suddenly as it had set on. Then, a long blue 
quiver from overhead streamed down and backward from the 


BOLTS AND BONDS. 


330 


southward-hurrying cloud athwart the very ridgepole, rending 
the air as if it were a solid substance ; and distinctly the crack 
and split of timber was heard in that long awfuluess which a 
second of time is filled with, when, through every separate par- 
ticle or fibre of thing or soul, the shock is felt and followed that 
overwhelms it. 

Mother Pemble sat straight up in bed. Deacon Ambrose 
neither saw nor thought of her. How he never knew, — 
whether by outward force or inward electrifying that sent him 
with involuntary spring, impossible to his mere muscles, — he 
was hurled from the window, and found himself staggering 
backward against the opposite wall. 

Whatever action or movement of his own had immediately 
preceded the catastrophe was for the time obliterated from his 
mind. His right hand was benumbed, then it quivered and 
stung with pain. 

He blundered to the door, made for the back rooms of the 
dwelling, he knew not why, — following instinctively the fearful 
rush of sound that had swept over him for an instant and left 
as it were an echoing trail in the mere memory of hearing. It 
was simply all of him that could remember or retain. 

Sarell and Hollis were out in the shed-room. They were 
crowding up some old mats against the broken windows. 
Care’line was in her bedroom. The old man passed every- 
body by, went in a half headlong fashion, as if the strange 
impetus which started him were not yet exhausted, to the door 
in the far end, and opened it right out against the columns of 
the now driving rain. 

A huge buttonwood tree that grew by the corner of the barn 
building a few paces oflT had been rent straight down its trunk. 
One half had fallen ; it stretched across the crushed rails of 
the hog-pen, and heaped its branches high up in the garden 
beyond. 

The defining of the occurrence restored point and balance to 
the deacon’s mind. The fresh, sweet air — the bolts of rain, their 
tremendous discharge, instantaneous and complete, like each 
successive outrush of the tempest, were already shortening and 
thinning, and the clear, blue light was sifting through the 


334 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


clouds — revived him. He stood in the doorway, and remem- 
bered his poor swine. He gave the familiar call to them. Not 
a squeal or a grunt answered. Three magnificent porkers, as 
they found out presently, lay there dead. 

But the house and the barn were spared. A delicious breath, 
that could hardly be of the same atmosphere that had brewed 
the hurricane, stole gently through the opened rooms. The sun 
shot a long-slanted beam, that turned the tree-bosoms golden, 
and kindled the mercy-sign in loveliest color against the sullen, 
distant-dropping vapor-masses. The very hailstones had not 
melted yet under the fences ; but the bruised coniblades were 
shining in a new, sweet light, and all forth into the deep and 
tender west, wide gates began to open on a lavish, compensating 
glory. 

Everybody but Mother Pemble was out there by the door, 
breathless with the amazement and the sudden peace. And old 
Squire Puttenham, forgetting to give a reason why, came riding, 
pale and dripping, into the house-yard. 

It was a good ten minutes after, — when damage had been 
hastily reconnoitred, when Squire Puttenham, shivering, had 
looked over the fallen tree into the debris of the pig-pen, upon 
the huddled bodies of the swine that lay in a limp, strange 
heap, as if one boneless, jellied mass ; when he had ejaculated, 
with a certain restraint, being a non-pi'ofessor, “ Well, Deacon, 
that ’s a turrible sort o’ thing, ain’t it 1 ” and Ambrose had 
replied, diaconally. “ It ’s solium, Square ! It might ’a ben you or 
me!” to which Sarell, a little in the background, had responded 
with innocent great eyes and a tinge of the same devoutness, 
“ Jest as well as not ! ” — it was then that Care’line recollected 
the east room and its helpless tenant. 

“ Do, f ’ mercy’s sake somebody go look after ma I ” she said 
in her soft, large-vowelled way. And Sarell went. 

The deacon bethought himself of hospitality, and led the 
old squire in to the kitchen fire. 

Mother Pemble lay looking after the deacon. Was he struck! 
she wondered. 

But she heard his steps, recovering themselves as he went 
to someHiing of the usual shuffle, continue on through the 


BOLTS AND BONDS. 


335 


opened house-way. And presently Care’line’s ponderous, but 
elephant-like cushioned tread follow, with such rapidity as was 
consonant, after him, from her bedroom. Even electricity would 
take appreciable time to thrill through Care’line, or send her 
anywhere. 

Then the horseback rider passed the windows ; and then 
came all the voices and the moist wind through the rooms, from 
far away there out of doors. 

Mother Pemble’s eyes had not waited for her ears. They 
were used — her senses — to swift division of labor. The dea- 
con never departed in ordinary fashion that she did not follow 
his track searchingly, as if some clew or testimony might have 
been dropped in it. 

This time something was dropped. Off there by the cup- 
board wall lay the sacred, inaccessible bunch of keys. At last 
her chance had come. 

“ It took a thunder-clap to do it, though ! ” Mother Pemble 
ejaculated in a whisper, as she got up on her knees in bed. 

Soft, reflected light was smiling in at the front windows. 
The storm was broken, and was drifting harmlessly off. That 
had been the whole of it. “ An’ it was sent^' Mother Pemble 
said to herself, with the piousness that seeketh and findeth its 
perverted own. 

If it had still been sending, she might have suffered the tortures 
of Tantalus, with her opportunity lying there before her eyes, 
and remained passive. In that blaze of heaven she would have 
been afraid of the touch of something, perhaps, more essentially 
dangerous than the dangerous metal. But under the restored 
light of common day, and in the common equilibrium, things 
that glared and thrilled with sudden threat subside swiftly into 
passive innocuousness. There is even something exhilarant 
and intensifying to the habitual mood and motive in the reaction 
to it from what momentarily drove it out and now puts on to 
calm review a morbid color. 

She had a right to know. That, at least. She had waited for 
something like this, she knew not what, and it had come. There 
was not a second to waste in hesitating. For doing, — for fol- 
lowing up with after-measures, — there was no question of that 
at present. 


336 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


Uncle Amb had left her door, every door in succession, wide 
open. There was no latching down or shutting in. He would 
recollect or reason well enough that it had been so. 

But Mother Pemble had practised certain motions like a cat. 

In an instant she had slid from under her bedclothes and 
slipped across the room. 

For a half breath she hesitated with the bunch of keys in her 
hand, and her glance directed longingly to the secretary. But 
she glided back, plunged her hand into her bedside bag, and 
drew forth a key similar in size to the longest, slenderest one of 
the deacon’s. These two, sliding her spectacles down from the 
top of her head to her nose, she carefully compared ; put wards 
to wards, aud measured their divisions ; nodded her head, with 
eyes of delight, seeing that her own differed only in respect of 
a single projection, which was a hair’s breadth too wide. It Jiad 
almost fitted. Why not quite, she had not before known. 

She set her ears like a hare’s for another second’s listening. 
Then she dropped her own key back into its place, flitted over 
to the panelled wall again, and noiselessly deposited the buAch 
precisely on the spot whence she had lifted it ; listened again, 
and with swift steps reached the secretary. She was pretty 
sure he had not fastened it. This chance had seemed of itself 
to be enough till her eyes had fallen blessedly upon the other. 
Now, “please the pigs,” — she actually uttered that fetish- 
invocation in her eager glee, not dreaming how with grim 
grotesqueness it applied, — she would have both. But the 
one that gave a power, to which the other would but confirm 
a satisfying motive, had been made sure of. 

She tried the little brass knob. She was right. The grooved 
slide rolled back. 

Inside, directly before her, lay the papers, — three, large, new, 
separate, sharply folded ; a thin bundle of others, old, narrow, 
cornei’-curled, irregular. 

She noted, instantaneously, just how they were placed then 
quickly ran through the fresh sheets with a half unfolding of 
each one, frightening herself with its crackle, as she listened 
keenly beyond it all the while for any movement toward her in 
the house. 


BOLTS AND BONDS. 


337 


They were bonds for one thousand dollars each, two of them 
headed, in a clear, handsome, semicircular line of copperplate 
lettering, “ Rutland Railroad Company ; ” the other, with its 
conspicuous horizontal imprint, “ United States of America,” 
bearing at top, in two comfortable little curves, “ Five per 
cent Consols” — “of the United States.” 

“ I knowed it ! I knowed it ! An’ I ’ll lay my life there ’s 
more on ’em ! ” The barefooted, spectacled, nightcapped old 
lady chuckled as she tremblingly replaced them, her eyes fairly 
scintillating sparks through her glasses. 

Something tingled in her ears with the excitement that con- 
fused her listening ; a panic seized her ; she dared not examine 
the tied-up parcel. Hastily adjusting them all to lie precisely 
as she had found them, she rolled the panel forward, turned 
toward the bed, and had just passed round its foot when Sarell’s 
brisk step came along the passage. 

Mother Pemble had but one thing to do, and did it. 

She stretched herself down upon the floor, face flat and arms 
out-flung, close beside the standard of her table and partly be- 
neath the hanging folds and fringes of the valance. 

“ Oh dear ! Oh dear ! ” she moaned then, as she lay there, and 
Sarell came in. 

“ Is that you, Care ’line ? I thought you ’d never a come, — 
noan on ye ! ” 

She had made a mistake there ; she could not think of every- 
thing, and Sarell caught her up. 

“ Care’line ! ” she repeated scornfully. “ You know better ’n 
that. You know a wheelbarrer from a hayriggin’ ! You know 
best how you come down there, Mother Pemble ! ” 

“ I don’t know nothin' ! ” whimpered the prostrate woman. 
“ The deac’n was in here ; I don’ know ! I ’m right here where 
ye see me. ’T would n’t be strange if we ’s both struck.” 

“ I should n’t persume it would,” assented Sarell coolly, for 
the second time, “ only you ain’t.” And she stood stock still, 
looking at her. 

“ Ain’t ye goin’ t’ help me 1 0, ye crewel-hearted thing ! 

Ain’t ye ashamed 1 Do fetch somebody an’ left me up! Oh 
dear! ” and “ Oh dear I ” 


22 


838 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


“ Humph ! ” said Sarell, deliberately advancing. “ I don’t 
want no help. Nor you neither, Mother Pemble, more ’n you ’ve 
hed these seven years, an’ that ain’t mine nor Care’line’s nor 
yet the Lord’s ! ” 

She stooped down and put her strong arms around and under 
the limp figure that had not grown heavy with the years of pre- 
sumed inaction, but had rather thinned. Mother Pemble’s life 
being more that of the nerves than the nutrition. She lifted it 
with pure mechanical power, and no slightest motive of tender- 
ness. It might have been a log and not a woman. She laid it 
in its place among the pillows, drawing up the coverings over 
it. Then she sat down in the nearest chair, with her face to- 
ward the bed. “You’d as good’s not be left alone again, I 
guess,” she said. 

“ Oh, yes ! ” Mother Pemble answered in a humble, long- 
suffering way. “ Y’ ain’t bad t’ me after all, Sarell. Y’r bark ’s 
worse ’n y’r bite.” 

“ So ’s a miskeeter’s,” returned Sarell. “ But it means bite, 
too, ef y’ don’t look out, an’ so there ’s fair warnin’. I alwers 
respected a miskeeter f ’r that.” 

Mother Pemble changed the subject. “It was an awful 
clap,” she said, still feebly. “ Somethin' must ’a ben struck, — 
ef ’t wa’ n’t the deac’n ’n I.” 

“ Thiz three hogs killed,” Sarell answered in the same un- 
moved manner, but with the least exquisite emphasis on the 
numeral. 

At which point Care’line entered and Sarell departed, leav- 
ing mother and daughter to their own inquiries and explana- 
tions. 

The deacon came in, with no personal inquiries, his hand in 
his pocket, and making straight for his .desk. 

“ Where ’s my keys 1 ” he said then, withdrawing his fingers 
from the unaccustomed emptiness, and regarding the secretary- 
front, from which nothing dangled. 

“ I must ’a hed ’em in my hand. ’T ain’t locked ! Where 
be they?” and he wheeled, with the vague, angry challenge 
some men use in such perplexity, upon the two women. 

“ Why don’t you look the way you went, Ambrose ? ” his 


BOLTS AND BONDS. 339 

placid wife interrogated. “ Things seem to have flew. Here ’s 
ma ben tumbled out o’ bed, an’ Sarell just picked her up.” 

“ He don’t ask after me,” parenthesized Mother Pemble’s ex- 
hausted whine. 

“ An’ the clock ’s stopped,” went on Care’line, without change 
of tone. “ An’ there ’s your keys, I guess, over against the 
winscot.” 

The deacon picked up the keys as if she ought to have spoken 
before. 

He looked into the secretary, saw all as it had been, then 
closed and locked it with a more vigorous twist than usual, and 
went forth again to join Squire Puttenham, with whom he 
presently walked away into the barn. 

Half points only were made, in any reckonings, by what had 
happened. 

Mother Pemble had seen with her own eyes those precious 
bonds. But there still remained the anxiety as to what, the 
deacon might mean or manage to do with them. 

Sarell Gately, with her own eyes also, had had evidence 
toward a fact which she believed existent ; she too might have 
“ laid her life there was more of ’em.” And yet it had been but 
half evidence, she was constrained presently to acknowledge, 
though she had so boldly put it at the moment to the abject 
old woman. Rashly, also ; there was nothing to gain by pre- 
cipitancy. Who should say that in such fright and shock a 
partly helpless creature might not have half flung herself and 
half been flung, or dragged from bed to floor, as she had found 
herl Just how much Mother Pemble was able to do remained 
unproved. That she should have got so far and no farther, — 
but had she got no farther 1 Sarell wondered when she heard 
about them, whether Mother Pemble could possibly have had 
any brief handling of those keys. The question in that case 
was, what she could possibly have accomplished by it 1 

Sarell could not altogether “ riddle it out.” But she came 
afresh to one conclusion, confirming her mind in it. That it 
was high time some honest folks should have a leading hold of 
the ropes at East Hollow ; and that it was her manifest destiny 
to establish herself there, in the winter that was coming, as 
Mrs. Hollis Bassett. 


340 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


CHAPTER XXXII. 

CASH AND INVESTMENT. 

Deacon Newell and Squire Puttenham had been talking 
about investments. Hawksbury was the northern village of 
Reade, the point nearest to the White Quarries, toward which, 
in the years of the stone-working, its growth had spread. There 
were sharp, stiiTing men there. Reade was a business town, the 
provincial centre ; there was capital there, and enterprise ; it 
kept up a live connection with the great world of stocks and 
interests. 

“ Nothing better, after all,” the squire had said, “ than good, 
paying first mortgages. Can’t melt down nor run away. Same 
time, I ’ve got a good many of ’em and things are stirring. Any 
spare cash on hand. Deacon, you ’d like to put into a good note 
and security! I might pass one over to you, if you would.” 

“Sech as!” inquired the deacon, adding, reservedly, “sup- 
posin’ ! ” 

“Well, there’s one on that new block of Liscomb’s. Lets 
out first rate, you know, and interest sure ; or perhaps that ’s 
too big, — four thousand. I ’ve got one on a couple of town lots, 

I them of Schatter’s, jest round from the Baptist Church, on West 
Row, seven per cent, — twenty-five hundred ; neat little pattern 
for you ’n me both. I don’t care about taking in more ’n that, 
at present.” 

“ Have n’t you got something on Heybrook’s farm ! ” 

“ Oh yes, of course. But those boys are w'orking to take it 
up. It ’ll begin to come in next quarter, should n’t wonder.” 

“ I might like t’ see about that, ef I could. That ’s all in 
the fam’ly.” 

The squire demurred. 

“ I ’ve alwers calc’lated t’ help Welcome out o’ that some- 


CASH AND INVESTMENT. 


341 


time,” the deacon resumed thoughtfully, “ ef I was spared an’ 
prospered. But I ’ve never see the day that I could do much 
about it, right out. I ’ve hed things draggin’ on me. Ef I 
could take hold an’ buy it up, now, o’ you, an’ the int’rest kep’ 
on cornin’ roun’ t’ me f’r a while, — well, gradooal, you see, I 
might work it, an’ I sh ’d hev my hand on it. I could kinder 
hand it in most any minute, ’cord’n’ to circumstahnces, or make 
sure that ’t wa’n’t a hole in Welcome’s share — or the boys’ — 
after my time. I ain’t got no children y’ know.” 

The squire looked at the deacon keenly. “ What ’s the kink 
there, I wonder 1 ” he said to himself. 

“Don’t exactly care about transferring that,” he returned, 
somewhat shortly, keeping his searching look on Ambrose’s 
face as if to watch the test, and see how deep the idea lay with 
him. But Ambrose Newell was as wooden as the big chopping- 
log in his own chip-yard, and as hard to move. 

“ I ain’t petickler, nuther,” he remarked stolidly. “ I like 
things that ’s cash or investments, ary one, ’cordin’ as y’ hev 
occasion. I ain’t in a hurry to tie anything up yet ; can’t lay 
by s’ fast but what I know p’utty well what to do with it. But 
ef I was to buy up, that ’s all I was a sayin’, — well, I would n’t 
want it no further off, nor no differ’nt, than jest that ol’ li’bilityo’ 
Welcome’s. I kinder hed turned it over in my mind that I 
might take hold of it that way. But ’t ain’t no matter.” 

“ If he had stopped at the first sentence,” thought Squire 
Puttenham, carefully balancing, “it might have looked like 
the upshot. But he wants it. It ’s what he came for. And 
there ’s a kink to it.” 

It was plain, anyway, that the deacon would put his cash 
into nothing else. And the squire wanted just about three 
thousand dollars to change into some new stocks that Flyuton 
Steele had dazzled him with. 

Flynton Steele was a man of half the squire’s age, and he 
was full of the affairs and chances of the day. The two had 
had their heads much together of late. The squire, with his 
rusty, old-fashioned business habits, but an eager outlook on 
the brilliant rush and movement of a time too young and shifty 
for him to keep personal pace with, w’as w'ith the man of active 


342 


ODD, OR EVEN V 


operation ais an old lady, half slipped from her dear life of 
dress and fashion, is with the younger one who can always come 
and tell her what everybody is wearing, and just how to cut 
her new gowns, or make over her old ones to most magnificent 
advantage. 

And Flynton Steele happened also to be Care’line Newell’s 
double cousin, once removed ; her very next of kin, after her 
mother. 

We hear much, in a moral way, of the subtile interlacings and 
complications of human motive, act, and influence. Here in 
Hawksbury was a suflBciently neat illustration of it, in a nice little 
cobweb pattern that is small enough to be easily and entirely 
traced. And Flynton Steele was as a brisk, athletic spider in 
the middle of it. 

He had a line that ran in among Squire Puttenham’s plans 
and good solid mortgages ; and another, — longer, slighter, 
more swaying, more dependent on contingency, — that reached 
out to East Hollow Farm, and caught there to he was scarcely 
sure what, in a dusky, half-explored comer. 

He fraternized and advised with both these men, the squire 
and the deacon ; so he did with a good many others. He had 
got hold, in a limited way, of the ideas and links of things that 
were making the fresh excitements of the gi*eat markets ; and 
had managed to connect himself, usefully, with certain handlers 
and manipulators of shares and values down there in the city, 
where he spent now some days of every week. 

There were nice little hoards of good, honest money around 
here, in a region where men were still somewhat easy in believ- 
ing what was told them. He had worked up some very pretty 
little percentages, both for himself and for some of these other 
people ; for although there were chances in all business, as he 
reminded his friends, and every venture might not tell in the 
right direction, still there must be enough tickling of profits to 
keep up his influence and opportunity ; and many a sale of far- 
off Nevada or Colorado shares, that would help, in the brokers’ 
bulletins, toward the lively general impression desired at the 
moment concerning them, and many a shrewd, quiet by-con- 
veyance of the same, managed by him, worked over against 


CASH AND INVESTMENT. 


343 


each other at once for the satisfaction of the men who backed 
his activities with a certain base of operating funds, — for his 
own commissions, — and for the little speculations, which his 
passing knowledge of how these or those rates were for the time 
being bound to rule, enabled him to carry out. This, at least, 
is as far as I understand about it ; what I have to do with is 
merely his relation to the direct interest of our story, and the 
fact of the curious play and connection of things that has been 
spoken of. 

The deacon and the squire never knew that they were in 
Steele’s cobweb : they thought they were spinning their own 
lines, and so they were ; for it is exactly thus these interlacing 
meshes are made ; everybody’s little purpose runs its own way, 
only here and there, finding the perhaps unfastened intersec- 
tions, some shrewd Araneid crosses and catches his thread 
where it may make an assured and busy centre for himself. 

Mr. Flynton Steele usually began the subject with the 
squire ; it was certain to work about to the deacon ; and then 
the deacon was as certain to work about with the idea so sug- 
gested to himself. Mr. Steele did not care to put himself for- 
ward openly and voluntarily to the knowledge or handling of 
Ambrose Newell’s affairs : he answered his questions ; he gave 
him what he asked for ; and he meant sincerely enough to 
counsel or conduct for the old gentleman’s direct profit and 
benefit, according to the Golden Rule, — which operated here 
as a plain statement of act and result ; doing for the deacon 
being precisely the doing by that same means as he would 
himself some day, be done by, if the “times came round.” 

The deacon had got fired up about those Nevada shares ; but 
he did not talk that way about them to the squire ; he only 
listened, with eyes a little wider than he was aware, to what 
the latter let fall as hearsay, and with the wise distrust that is 
sd apt to be a secret, hankering credence ; adducing what 
“ they said ” in ostensible contrast to a sounder common sense. 
All the while that the squire was quoting wild speculating 
rumors in comparison with, and as argument of preference for, 
his own, old-fashioned, slow-and-sure methods and “paying 
first mortgages,” he was moving cautiously and covertly, and 


344 


ODD, OR EVEN V 


seeking to move the deacon collaterally, toward a transference 
of some of his closely secured funds in that very same hazard- 
ous direction. 

They were upon a small scale, in a mere comer; but they 
were working by the same bad, strange law that has got hold 
of men everywhere ; that will hardly let any purpose come face 
to face, right out, with any other. Is this odd machine, — this 
world that labors so with the crooked indirections of its multi- 
plying powers, — ever to come simple again, and, keeping its 
growth of wisdom and appliance, work straight and evenl 
How can we look for it, while it counts and works by separate, 
covetous, distrustful ones, and ever less and less by honest twos 
and generous threes, that dare to gather together in the name 
of a Living Truth and Love, and deal with each other eye to 
eye and heart to heart 1 

Ambrose Newell bought up the mortgage ; he paid those 
three thousand-dollar bonds in exchange for it ; then, with an 
easier conscience and a “ livelier hope ” he went and put the 
half of another thousand into Flynton Steele’s hands, for a 
week or two, as a trial. “ From two to five per cent a week,” 
was what Flynton had told him things could be made to turn 
over, by such persons as “knew how.” 

He had not many more of the fresh, crispy papers ; he could 
not have paid up his debt to Welcome and have had an equal 
share of his savings to himself ; that was what he had been 
waiting for ; but now it looked as if there might be ways of 
stimulating, as it were, the promises ; swifter means of putting 
himself iu the way of “ being prospered.” 

If those boys came in with a payment on the mortgage, — the 
interest and possible payments were still to be collected for him 
by Squire Puttenham, — then that sum, doubled if he could 
double it, and if the trial investment came out well, should go 
into these new channels ; and if he could make things grow hs 
Flynton said they could grow, after they had once attained a 
certain size, — if he could put in, by and by, for some big bite 
of a big apple, — it might come so as that he could get that 
whole old score, back interest and all, off his mind without feel- 
ing it. He wanted that big bite first. He wanted to play with 


CASH AND INVESTMENT. 


345 


the whole bag of marbles awhile, before he paid back the lot 
of them he owed that would so shrink it down ; and yet his 
magnanimous avuncular heart warmed itself quite suddenly up 
with the reflection, “ What a fust-rate job it ’ll be to ’a made out 
for them air boys ! ” 

I don’t suppose he was all alone in the fashion of his living 
between an actual, daily wrong and a sublime, constantly 
intended right. I am afraid there is no such altogether odd 
thing in the world as the one only man who would do that. 

In September, then, Israel Heybrook paid up five hundred 
dollars on the three-thousand-do] lar mortgage, into Squire Put- 
tenham’s hands. It was indorsed on the note, and came right 
round with it to Deacon Newell again. Then Deacon Newell 
took his own first five hundred, that had come back to him 
from its dove’s flight with an olive-branch of some twelve per 
cent gain in five weeks, put the interest in his pocket-book, and 
sent forth the principal with Israel’s five hundred, to buy more 
marketing. 

This time, Flynton put him into a “western railroad teter.^ 
Bee Line was going up slowly from low figures ; Grand Tangent 
was softly dropping down. Flynton Steele had another com- 
parison. “ ’T is n’t so much which cistern looks the fullest ; 
the question is, which way is the long leg of the siphon ? Grand 
Tangent’s drawing off ; the little Bee Line ’ll be over the brim 
in six months.” 

And so it was ; and in that time six hundred more of Israel 
Heybrook’s was in it, and that other five of Uncle Arab’s from 
the fourth bond, and the odd hundreds of makings and savings 
from ventures and farm profits, and a fresh, whole thousand, — 
the last that had been in the big wallet the day of the storm. 

Three or four times that winter. Uncle Amb sat at his desk, 
pen in hand, dipping it and letting it dry, as he held it over 
the mortgage deed. At last, one day, some strong angel who 
would not suffer him to drop into lowest perdition, grasped 
the momentary will of him, and with the half voluntary plunge 
into act — as it may have seemed to himself — of a suicide, 
he wrote three lines across it, and his name. 

A long, hard breath came as he finished, and “ There ! that 


346 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


much can’t be took back ! ” escaped him in an undertone. 
Mother Pemble knew some deed was done ; but she did not 
even dare to get up on her knees in bed, to try if she could 
peer over and discover what it might be done about. 

Only half done. Would it stand, “ if anything happened ” 1 
It must be witnessed and recorded. Meanwhile, it w’ent back, 
with its three lines of cancel and discharge, into the old secre- 
tary again. 

Some souls have to be saved by inches. 

Mother Pemble kept her sentry, — if you don’t know what that 
originally meant, it was the duty of the man set to look after 
and take care of the dirty water gathering in the bilge of the 
vessel, — over every sign and movement, silently, in these days ; 
carrying on such history as she could from w'atch to watch. 
She could only hypothesize ; she only knew that there was 
“ pussonal,” in one shape or another, in the old desk, and that 
Ambrose was “ fixin’ things.” She kept on wdth her counter 
fixing. All through those weeks she was doing, at secret 
intervals, with her door latched, some new, strange, patient 
work, — work with a thin, flat file, rasping monotonously back 
and forth, upon a stubborn little bit of steel. Slow work, long 
waiting. 

Some souls, also, — and seemingly to their relish, — are 
damned by inches. 

And all winter long the shares of the Bee Line, whose certifi- 
cates lay there with the Heybrook mortgage, went up and up, 
till they more than half doubled their par value. “ Those big 
fellows from the Grand Tangent were in it. It was pretty near 
time for the little fellows to get out again,” said Flynton Steele. 

Through the winter Uncle Amb seemed bright and strong, 
better, since the steady cold had set in, than he was before he 
had that summer “ poor spell.” He drove in and out of 
Hawksbury, and boasted that he was “good yit, athout 
patchin’." 

Mother Pemble said to herself, “Thiz a kind o’ smartness 
that comes jest after somethin’s gi’n up. Spells o’ strong, an’ 
spells o’ weak, that ’s the way it toes oflf ; and thiz a piece gone 
ev’ry time. See how ’t ’ll be, come spring.” 


CASH AND INVESTMENT. 


347 


Sarell, too, — meanwhile become Mrs. Bassett, — thought 
forecastingly of the spring, and kept her faithful eyes open clear, 
and her wise mouth close shut. Shut, as the time went on, upon 
a half-changed sense of things. 

Down in her heart, some feeling that had been reached by 
that summer sermon of the “ midst,” would now and then be 
conscious of a pain. “ It ’s sorrerful t’ see, in two old, dyin’ 
creeturs,” she would pause and think. “ If they could only be 
got at, now, in th’ room o’ bein’ got round, — but they ’ve got 
to be got round, whether or no. I wonder — only I ’ve no 
business, I ain’t pious, — if that ain’t jest the same kind o’ wish 
an’ w’Orry the Lord hes t’ git along with f’r ev’ry one on us.” 

All this, however, just now, anticipates. 


848 


ODD, Oil EVEN ? 


CHAPTER XXXIII. 

“ WALKING PRIDE.” 

It was decided that the Everidges should not at once take 
the house in town. The wedding was fixed to be in November : 
all must be left till after that, and then it would be late in the 
season to make such a move. They might decide to take rooms 
after Christmas, but the whole subject was put by for the pres- 
ent. All things were merged in the beautiful confusion of clouds 
of lace, cataracts of shining silks, soft heaps of delicate woollen 
stuffs, furs, feathers, velvets ; the glitter of colors, the scatter 
of finishing trifles, gloves, handkerchiefs, embroideries, lovely 
ties and fichus, exquisite slippers and marvels of hosiery ; over 
and above all the regular parental providings, the coming in of 
gifts, — silver, art-objects, all imaginable luxuries of personal and 
household appointment, toilet elegances, mirrors, flagons, sconces, 
bronzes and porcelains, rugs and screens ; to descend to partic- 
ular and instance, — five bannerets, ten fans, sixteen Japanese 
trays, eight brass dragons, seventy -two Majolica butter plates. 

One room was given up to freight, one to merchandise, one 
to machines and seamstresses and Paris patterns ; the family 
was absolutely crowded into corners. It took one servant’s 
time to receive at the door ; another’s to drive about with 
Euphemia’s gratitude, done up in scented, monogrammed sta- 
tionery. It was difficult to realize that there was anything else 
whatever going on upon the small, round world. It was still 
more difficult to realize that it was all about Mr. Sampson 
Kaynard, or that he would ever be able to take it all, bride 
included, who was so very entangled and inaccessible among her 
preparations, away. 

They called France in to the trying on of the wedding-dress. 
The room was all wedding-dress. Her sister looked at her from 


349 


“ WALKING PRIDE.” 

{i far environment of white glory, around whose verge family 
and attendants were carefully hovering. It rippled and glittered 
and flowed, misty with lace, frosted with silver-broidery, orange 
garlands falling along its drifted folds like flowers of snow on 
snow, orange blossoms crowning the head and clustering upon 
the bosom about which the slight beginning of it all was fitted, 
and the growing splendor thence swept down and away, like the 
shining trail of a comet from its small, distant nucleus. 

France stood out in space, by the doorway. The dressmaker 
and the sewing-girls were in ecstasies. To have got all that 
together, and to have fastened it with any sort of logic to one 
little figure of a woman, was their triumph. 

“ Look at France’s eyebrows, mamma ! ” cried the bride, from 
over the border. “ She puts it all into them. She won’t say 
a word.” 

“ Don’t you think it is love — ly. Miss France 1 ” appealed the 
dressmaker. 

“ It is a lovely — glacier,” said France slowly. “But I don’t 
think I should exactly like to be dressed in a glacier. It will 
go all down the church aisle, Phemie. And how will you turn 
round ? And won’t it make Mr. Kaynard’s coat-tails look very 
queer 1 ” 

“ France ! you ’re too odd to live ! ” 

“ Phemie ! ” expostulated Mrs. Everidge. 

“ To live in Boston, at any rate,” amended Euphemia. 

“Nothing is too odd to live in Boston,” said France pleas- 
antly, “ and you ’re beautiful, Effie, but you ’re a great way off*.” 

“ Come round then.” 

France went round and kissed her. 

“ Right here, where you really are, it is exquisite,” she said, 
“ but it ought to be you, and not a river of white satin. Look 
at your two little feet and then at all those yards ! Have you 
tried to walk?” 

Effie made a few steps forward : the billows of satin crawled ; 
they clung and drew back upon the carpet. The dressmaker 
spread out the hem. “ It is so stately ! ” she said. “ And up the 
aisle, — I ’ll be at the door myself to draw it back the last thing 
as you go in, — to the wedding march, you know ; why, it ’s 
the whole making of a bride ! ” 


350 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


France remembered Sarell Gately and her way of saying it. 
“ To walk pride in. Don’t they walk pride in Boston 1 ” And 
she still wondered what there would seem to be of Mr. Sampson 
Kaynard beside it all. 

Very much what there might be of Mr. Hollis Bassett beside 
the grass-green silk. 

Truly there was not so very great a difference. 

Sarell wrote France a letter to tell of her becoming Sarell 
Bassett. It came just in the midst of the more elegant present- 
ment of the same human experience. 

“ I presume youl want to know how the weddin was an about 
pearin out. Mrs. Heybrook wanted me to be maried thare, but 
I diddnt seem to feel as if it wold be the best. So twas at 
Cerinthy Jane’s. Come to, twas past over prutty simple. 
Ceriuthy Jane coudnt have much of a housefull, count of its 
not bein much of a house and thar bein the baby. I did alwers 
think if twas ever sos that I shoud be maried, I d have a weddin 
that I coud remember it by. But you hardley ever cary out 
all you mean to in this world. I kinder dropt off one thing 
after another that diddnt seem to be of any everlastin conser- 
quence when you took em up an lookt em over seperit, but 
altogether thayd of made the weddin, though the mane thing is 
to get maried to be sure, an I mean now to setle down on that 
an be contentid. 

“ I had a kind of stoncolord tybet tumin on the blue, polanay 
cut in tags an bound with blue, an a blue fethear in my hat. 
That was to travil in. We was maried in the mornin an had 
cake an wine, an then went down to Creddles Mills on the stage 
an took the cars right up again to Reade. We had dinner at 
the Podunk House, an a girl that tends thare used to live over 
our way an knew me, so she had it all out that I was a bride, 
an the people in the parlor (only they wasnt thare morn one at 
a time) looked at us while we walked up an down on the bal- 
corny. Thare want any body thare but an old gentleman and 
his wife, that seemed to be passin threw, and she said my dear 
to me kinder simpathyzin, and a man that travils with siscors 
and pocket-books and his wife, and a school teacher and a book- 
agent that tried to sell us a parlor table ciclepedior, and Hollis told 


“WALKING PRIDE. 


351 




him we haddent got our parlor table yet. And no lezhur com- 
pany at all but us, so we was full as conspickyeous as we cared 
about bein considerin the sort we had to be conspickyeous to. 
But of course that’s just as you happen to hit the track when 
you start out ; you cant tellergraph and range folks if you was 
Nellie Grant or Minnie Sherman themselves. 

“ We kep on up in the afternoon train to North Sudley and 
round home next day with a hired team threw Hawksberry. It 
want a great deal of a journey, and you wouldent think we 
could of spent ten dollars, but we did, and that was as fur as 
we anyways calcerlated to go. I told Hollis it was right round 
in a ring, and he said yes, but twas a weddin ring, and that 
made all the difference, and so it did. Besides, thare was Sun- 
day and the pearin out left to think of. I did have a green 
silk after all, but it was on the ollive shade, and that is more 
genteel, I guess youll say. And the gloves are a perfick match. 
I had to get an extry fethear, which is pecock, to change in 
my hat to wear with it, but you dont ushilly get married but 
once in this world, and if you cant have an extry fethear then 
I dont see as you can ever rashonally expect to anywhere. 

“ Hollis looked real nice and stilysh, and if it hadent been for 
two things I should have been satisfied. But then you aint to 
be satisfied in this life I suppose, and the set times for it are 
dreadful short and uncertin about makin their connecsions 
with the times in general. One thing was, Ive alwers said in 
my own mind that Fellaiden folks wouldent ever see me figger- 
in off with Hollis Bassett on them church steps onless twas 
once for all as Missis Bassett. And lo and behold thare want 
scursely a soul thare to know when I did figger. It was a 
windy day and too thare might have been some spite in it. 
But anyway, the girls that used to stand round fast enough had 
all gone in when we got thare, and when we came out they 
staid in to see the minister’s sister that had just come of all 
times in the world for that pertickler Sunday. Shes a perfick 
bewty, and she had on a black silk i and a cream-colored ribbin 
with a brown edge to it on her bunnet, and one long cream-col- 
ored rosebud and one crimson one droppin out of the knott 
of it with limber stems and green leaves, that looked just 


352 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


picked, and some kind of a soft shawl with every kind of a 
soft shady collor in it, and a face that thare was no use in 
anybody else peariu out the same six months with, and that 
was the other thing. And I told Hollis ridin home that it was 
no use, as long as the sun went round the world for everybody, 
try in to make a pertickler day for yourself. It had to jibe 
on to everybody elses day after all. For my part I was 
thankful the pertickler one was over now and wed come to 
settle down to everyday. To that he said every day was per- 
tickler enough for him now, and he was thankful for every per- 
tickler day, and that was jest what he set out to be, and 
expected to keep on bein, which I thought was pearin out bright 
and kind for Hollis whatever else made a shine or diddent. 
And I recklected what you said that day about walkin pride in 
your heart. But I had to hector him a little too jest because I 
was so pleased. Every day on the farm, for stiddy work you 
know Hollis, and keepin round sharp after Uncle Amb and 
Mother ‘Pemble, and carryin Caroline on our backs. And says 
Hollis, what if w^eve gone and tied ourselves down to East Holler, 
and shes all certin true after all, and got to be waited on incessunt, 
and Deacon Amb dooes live on till hes ninety-nine and a week 1 
What if! says I. What if — the cow should eat up the grin- 
ston 1 which no mortal cow ever did yet, all in one peace at 
any rate. 

“ Ive told you all my nuse now. Thare may be more some 
time. If you want me to and say so. 111 let you know as the 
times comes round. 

“ So I remain youres affecksionetly, 

“Sarah Ella Bassett.” 

France told Phil, whom she saw often now, about Mrs. Bas- 
sett’s letter, and received in return, as she had a subtle sense 
she should do, his last news from Fellaiden. Mrs. Fargood 
wrote quite full of news ; of the “ ’pearin’ out,” and how well the 
bride had looked in her olive green ; quite shy and modest, too, 
without any seeming as if she thought she was the whole 
chnrchgoing that day, — psalm, sermon, and benediction, — as 
most brides did. If Sarell could have known that her quench- 


“ WALKING PRIDE.” 353 

ing was but lighting her up ! But one sees that the grace of our 
quenchings is just that we can’t know. 

The doctor’s wife told also of Miss Kingsworth’s coming, azid 
that she was going to make her home with her brother, and 
that it was brightening him up wonderfully. “ Though if you 
can’t tell what a day may bring forth about one thing more 
certainly than another,” the good woman added, “ it ’s about a 
girl as pretty as that making a settled home anywhere for any- 
body but a husband. She has come right into the works, had a 
class in Sunday-school the first Sunday, and rode round all day 
Monday with Mr. Kingsworth making parish calls, not waiting for 
the folks to come and see her, which I call friendly and clever, 
whether it ’s genteel or not. I guess she means exactly not to be 
genteel, or give anybody time to set her off separate. Mr. 
Kingsworth has begun with his librery. He ’s taken the old 
schoolhouse for it, and put in Hiram Goodsum for librarian and 
carrier. The selectmen think well of it, and it’s thought that 
next town-meeting there ’ll be a vote carried to appropriate 
something, and make it a town affair, and pay Hiram some 
salary. There ’s nothing starts up a town like having some 
man start up in it with a shoulder for every good wheel. And 
as Mr. Kingsworth says, he may n’t live, or always be here, and 
a town ought to adopt whatever is worth while for it, and make 
sure of its being cairied along. Sounds well for him, when he ’s 
put in five hundred dollars to it, to start off with. It ’ll run on 
that for some time. But Fellaiden’s mighty tickled to get a 
town library just by voting it in and agreeing to raise not less 
than fifty dollars a year for it for the next five years. Hiram is 
in his element. He was always hankering wild after books, and 
now he ’s turned in to pasture in a ten-acre mowing. Mr. 
Kingsworth and Miss Leonora and Israel Heybrook have been 
up there two days, ranging the books, and now they ’re making 
out the catalogue.” 

After this, the letter passed to items of sickness and health, 
of household doings and changes, of fall butter sales and thanks- 
giving turkeys, and ceased to be interesting. 

France walked up the hill from the train, in which she had 
met young Merriweather, wondering what had made her so 

3 


354 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


vaguely uncomfortable. The next day she went into town 
again, on purpose to call on Miss Ammah at the Berkeley. 

Miss Ammah did not comfort her the least bit in the world, 
somehow, although she did not know what definite comfort she 
was looking for, or that she needed any. 

“ People find their places ; and there ’s always a like for a 
like,” Miss Ammah said. “ The good Lord does n’t leave any 
of us to quite starve out. There ’s always manna, and some- 
times quails, in every desert. I ’m glad they ’re going to have 
such a nice winter up there.” 

“ Up there ” seemed poles away from where France found 
herself, set back in her old surroundings, with all outward hold 
and tie broken from that one chance placing and relation of the 
short summer. She had not realized how this would be. 

And yet the trains ran every day their four hours’ trip up 
toward the hills, and the Creddles Mills stage and the farm- 
ers’ wagons, went back and forth between there and Fellai- 
den. The depots, “ Maine, Eastern, Fitchburg,” stared her in 
the face from under the roofs of the gay street-cars, as she went 
up and down among the shops. There was a straight line 
enough ; but what was ever going to take her over it again, or 
bring anybody down from thence 1 

Miss Ammah said something about her house. “ I may have 
to run up there before spring,” she told the girl. And that 
was simply a fine exasperation, — as fine as the prick of a cam- 
bric needle upon a fresh-smarting surface. 

France sat perfectly silent, thinking of the snows upon the 
long slopes, that she had so wanted to see ; and of the glitter of 
great icy tree-tops in the climbing sun. 

Miss Ammah glanced at her furtively, and cruelly changed 
the subject, upon which, after the smallest decent interval, 
France Everidge rose and went away. 


HOBGOBLINS. 


355 


CHAPTER XXXIV. 

HOBGOBLINS. 

Sarell was setting up her empire at East Hollow, 

She was fully instated now as housewife. She and Hollis had 
the little end room beyond the buttery, and the sloping corner 
attic over it in the long roof. The kitchen itself passed under 
her sole regulation, and in this she worked changes with a free 
hand, bringing it to an expression of herself which was far 
enough from any look it had worn in Care’line’s nominal rule. 

“ If I ’m to content myself down and stay,” she said, “ I must 
fix matters to look like it. There 's certin things I must do 
somewheres, you see, or I might as well be Sarell Gately, chorin’ 
round, as Missis Bassett.” And Care’line passively assented 
to whatever did not disturb her and her rocking-chair. 

“Git me a pot o’ Venishian red,” Sarell said to Hollis, 
“ an’ some vermilyun.” 

The tall dresser-shelves, that reared up in homely stateliness 
from table beneath to ceiling above, soon took on, under her 
touch, a warm, heavy tint ; and the sparkling tins made fine 
array against the dull, deep color. The chimney-bricks, back 
of the lustrous stove, and up under the high brown mantel, 
were put in corresponding hue ; and the broad hearth beneath 
glowed with scarlet, freshly laid on, from week to week in 
whatever touches were needed, with the vermilion powder, 
mixed in milk and molasses, that made it shine as with a 
varnish. 

The splint-bottomed armchair, with its tall-barred back, was 
also in vermilion, properly prepared as paint, with oil and tur- 
pentine ; and this stood back so that the dark shade of the 
dresser threw out the lines in cheerful relief. The floor was 
already of the solid, time-honored, deep yellow. Sarell was 


356 


ODD, on EVEN ? 


artistic without knowing it. If she had come down to Boston 
and its neighborhoods at this time, where one touch of paint-pot 
made the whole world kin, she would have found that she had 
put herself in precisely the last reach and demonstration of re- 
finement, where at the primitive point in the cycle of the color- 
passion, savagery and study meet. 

She sat down beatified, in her first completed splendors. 

“You don’ know,” she said, “the comfort them red shelves 
is, every time I look at ’em.” 

Hollis looked at the bright cheeks and the blue shine of the 
eyes and the toss of the deep gold hair, and satisfied his eyes 
also as to the harmonies of the original principles of refracted 
lights. 

“ Y’ don’t half see,” said Sarell taking in herself every de- 
tail, knowing, like any artist, where every touch had been and 
why, and avaricious that her public should discern it in particu- 
lar also. 

“Yes, I do,” said Hollis, sending his eyes round vaguely, and 
snatching them back again to her face. “ The desert ’s begin- 
nin’ t’ blossom, an’ t’ smile.” 

“ Out of one corner of its mouth,” said Sarell. “ But it ’s our 
corner. Order reigns — in that much of Warsaw.” Not know- 
ing anything about Warsaw, or the order, or how or why or 
when it reigned, 

“ Never rains, with you, but it pours, Sarell,” said Hollis, his 
look following her as she shot across to the dresser to arrange 
more exactly the interval of space between two gleaming tin 
coffee-pots, and slant their noses and handles more precisely 
parallel. “ I can’t see as you ’ve left a blessed thing to do 
anywheres.” 

“ No ; nor you wop’t see it any more. That ’s the eyesight 
of a man. Things ’ll shine all winter, that ’s all you ’ll know ; 
an’ you ’ll persume they ’ve kep’ on.” 

“ All I want ’s t’ hev things keep on,” said the satisfied Bene- 
dict ; and T think a little spiritual glimpse of what wifehood, 
and the moral shining, in a man’s eyesight, has to be for a 
woman, came to Sarell at the moment. “ A tug an’ a scrub, 
an’ t’ hev it look as ef it come so, an’ kep’. Well, I ’ve set out 


HOBGOBLINS. 357 

for’t, an’ please the Lord, I’ll see it thriew. ‘Walkin’ pride 
in your heart,’ — it ’s a good go-by,” she said to herself. 

This was November. The snow kept off late this year, and 
they were having beautiful weather, — beautiful for the husk- 
ing, and the getting in of the roots, and for the chopping of the 
firewood out in the open chip-yard. While Sarell put on her 
gay winter colors in the kitchen, adorning with substantial 
brightness her own especial and clear domain, and even stri).ight- 
ening and freshening here and there about the fixed Care’liue 
in the keeping-room, Hollis heaped up the golden treasury of 
the com-barns, and split and piled great walls of hearty oak and 
beech and maple and fat pine in the long shed-room ; leaving 
the huge, knotty maple “ chunks ” in grand supply for holding 
the long fires, twenty-four hours round, in the capacious keep- 
ing-room stove and in Mother Pemble’s bedroom. 

Mother Pemble heard the busy strokes, and the flying of -the 
meteoric chips out there before her north window; and of 
course she smelled the paint ; and with acute ears and nose, 
and questioning tongue, she kept the run of all the regular 
work and most of the innovating improvements. 

“ So the ol’ dresser ’s done over niew,” she said ; “an’ the big 
cheer, you told me, an’ what else 1 Seems to me it ’s wonderful 
times; ‘turrible times in the Jarseys,’ ’’ she quoted, from the 
old Revolutionary sayings passed on into home by-words and 
handed down to the second and third generations. “ I don’t 
see,” she added, one day, “ what need ther’ was, though, fer all 
them niew — ” and there she suddenly stopped. 

“Niew whatl” Sarell demanded as suddenly, stopping with 
something in her hand at the door. 

“ Land knows what ! ” the old lady answered, vaguely and 
pettishly; but the tone of her beginning had been quite to 
some specific purpose. “Tinkerin’ an’ hammerin’! night an’ 
day, p’utty near. Rivers or curtins or carpits or all three, I 
persuine ! I ain’t let into everything, layin’ here.” 

Which Sarell had been quite carefully aware of, and espe- 
cially as to the putting up of the fresh, cheap blue Holland 
shades to the three keeping-room windows, in place of the old, 
curled, crackled, dusty paper ones. Care’line herself had said, 


358 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


regarding the unusual expenditure, “It’ll be just as well, I 
guess, not to name it to ma.’’ 

“ I ketch a word now an’ agin, ef I carCt git it out dereck. 
Measurins an’ rus’lins, too, an’ steppins up an’ down. Y’ 
need n’t think I ’m deef or a fool. I c’n place things. I know 
the ol’ terrortory by heart.” 

Sarell never answered a syllable. But she told Hollis that 
night, ‘in a whisper, in the far privacy of their own apartment, 
that “ if the house got afire before mornin’ he ’d have to look 
out for the old lady. F’r 1 ’ve tied up the knob of the door to 
the handle of the press clussit,” she continued, when he did not 
at first respond. 

“ What ’s that furl” Hollis then naturally inquired. 

“T’ keep the cat out o’ the clussit,” his wife replied. 

Next morning, bright and early, Sarell softly loosed the cord 
and 'put it in her pocket. An hour after, when she took in 
Mother Pemble’s breakfast, the two women gave each the other 
one sharp glance, which had not the movement of an eyelid in 
it, nor was the fortieth part of a second long, and which each 
barely detected in the other, thinking her own bearing to be 
scrupulously and precisely as in common. But the one knew 
that she was watched, and the other was satisfied with her 
experiment. 

It was scarcely a week after that, when Dr. Fargood stopped 
his sulky out by the fence when Hollis was chopping in the 
chip-yard. 

“ Fine morning,” he said. “ Where ’s your big dogl ” 

“Bigdoargl Hain’t got any. K big doarg ! " he repeated, 
laughing between and after the emphasized syllables, with that 
ejaculatory merriment which takes the articulation of amazed 
disdain. “ Don’t you know the deacon better ’n that, doctor 1 ” 
and with that he lowered his voice, left his axe sticking in the 
maple chunk, and came to the fence, out of earshot from Mother 
Pemble’s north window. “ He would n’t keep a doarg three 
inches long, f’r fear as much as two of ’em would be stomach ! ” 

“ Well, I thought,” said the doctor, twinkling, and shaking 
his shoulders, “ that it could n’t exactly pay in any capacity as 
a dog, though I did n’t know what else it could be. It did n’t 


HOBGOBLINS. 


359 


seem to have any bark. It sat up straight on the doorstone 
there, as I drove up sharp from the Corner, and before I got 
near enough to make it fairly out, or it me, it dropped down 
on all fours and sneaked off behind the porch and the jog of 
the house. It puzzled me a good deal. It could n’t have been 
a calf or a cosset ; for neither of those animals sits on its 
haunches that I know of ; and I ’m pretty sure it was n’t a 
bear.” 

“What ’r ye talkin’ about, doctor? When was it all? What 
d’ ye mean ? ” asked Hollis, bewildered ; for the doctor was a 
man of fun as much as of physic. 

“ It was night before last ; past one in the morning, yester- 
day, rather. I was coming round to the Centre this way, and 
turned off up here from the meadow road. Pleasant night, 
too. Wonderful weather for this time of year ! ” 

But Hollis was not attending to the last words. “ On the 
doorstun?” he said, putting his foot up on the fence-bar, and 
scratching his head, with his elbow on his knee for a purchase. 
“ I ’m clear catterwampussed ! ” 

The doctor laughed. “ Things look queer in the night,” he 
said. “ I see a good many hobgoblins. That was the last 
one.” 

Hollis’s hat, displaced by his knuckles, tilted down over his 
forehead. He stood upright and shook it on again, as the 
doctor’s sulky rattled away, beyond the reach of further word. 
Doctors learn a surprising art of taking themselves off. 

Hollis went in to his wife, leaving the axe sticking in the 
maple. 

Sarell was trying out soap-grease, and the fat smoke choked 
him. 

“ Ugh, ugh, ugh ! What d’ ye think Doctor Fargood says, 
Sarell ? Thought we kep’ a hig doarg down here. Ha ! ugh ! A 
doarg without any bark to him — Ugh ! how that fat seffercates 
a feller ! See him sett’n up straight in the middle o’ the night 
out on the — ” 

Sarell thrust the dripping-spoon out at him in mid-air, with 
a gesture of imperative command. “ Hush up ! ” she half 
whispered, half signalled, with emphatic flash and set of white 


3G0 


ODD, OK EVEN? 


teeth and widening and closure of red lips, her brow knitting, 
and her head giving a little spasmodic shake. 

“ Psha ! Nonsense ! ” she said aloud, “ There, you ’re jest in 
time t’ lift that kittle off.” 

With that, and accompanying pantomime, she got him into 
the shed-room, and shut the door. “ Hollis Bassett,” she said, 
“ you ’re as innersunt as a baa-lamb. An’ I like you fur it. 
Only it won’t do to bla’ at anything in this house. Don’t you 
so much as tell me the wind ’s east, athout lookin’ to see first 
that the doorcrack ’s close. What is it about the dog on the 
doorstone 1 ” 

And then Hollis, much as if he had been warned of nitro-gly- 
cerine, and then set to handing along mysterious vessels, gave 
forth his words, divested of all natural impulse, in a scared, 
careful way, 

Sarell listened, with the air of taking in circumstantial evi- 
dence. “ All right ! ” she said at the end. “ Now we ’ll drop 
the subject. An’ don’t ever pick it up agin, Hollis, with the 
doctor nor nobody else ; not even me, ’less more comes of it. 
An’ if I should be took bad with a toothache in the night, or, 
in meetin’, say, some Sunday, an’ hev t’ come out in sermon- 
time, don’t you take no notice, nor git a mite anxious. ’T won’t 
be nes’cery, an’ — wait a minute ! ” 

She left him, and disappeared through the keeping-room ; 
looked in at Mother Pemble’s door, which she found unlatched, 
and inquired hastily of that lady if she had seen anything of 
the deacon; then returning, “Now,” she said to Hollis, “jest 
step round that way and lock the parlor-porch door on the 
outside, and fetch the key to me, will ye 1 ” 

“ What fur 1 ” asked Hollis, as if that form of words were in- 
variably effectual of its purpose. 

“ To keep the dog off the doorstone,” Sarell replied, relevantly 
and concisely. 

Hollis accepted the statement, or what it covered, and his 
errand, in which he showed — and Sarell appreciated it — not 
obtuseness and abjectness, but brightness and a generous sweet- 
ness. It is oftener the fact with the henpecked than the peck- 
ers are aware. As he passed out of the shed-place and around 


HOBGOBLINS. 361 

the house outside, Sarell made her way again to Mother Pern- 
ble’s room, where she began to rummage in a cupboard. 

The old woman, sitting up against her pillows, knitting-work 
in hand, glowered at her over her spectacles. “ What now 1 ” 
she demanded. 

“Care’line’s pressboard, — the narrer one,” returned Sarell, 
knocking the door with her elbow back against the wainscot, 
and sending a tack-hammer clattering down from the shelves. 
“ An’ ’t ain’t here, neither ; not as I see.” She shoved things 
back and forth a minute longer, replaced the iron hammer, with 
a drop of its claw end upon the hollow-sounding board, and 
closed the door with a small slam to fasten the slip-latch. 

Mother Pemble scrutinized her deliberately through all these 
movements. “ What ’s goin’ on in this house, for all that racket 
to kiver up, I wanter know 1 ” she said. “ I c’n see thriew a 
millstone, Sarell Bassett ! ” 

“ Perticklerly when the millstone ain’t there,” replied Sarell, 
calm with the consciousness of one suspected in quite a wrong 
direction. She picked up a bit of patchwork, as she spoke, that 
had fallen out of a basket in the cupboard, and, opening the lit- 
tle door again, returned it to its place. “We c’n all do that. 
Mis’ Pemble ; or when,” she added, irresistibly impelled, “ the 
millstone ’s s’ near home ’t we c’n put our eye t’ the shaft-hole 
athout reachin’ or strainin’. Only, in that case. Mis’ Pemble, ef 
ther ’s anything grindin’ we must look out fer our noses ! ” 

“Y’ need n’t Mis’ Pemble me more’n’s perfectly comf ’table 
’n c’nvenient. Mis’ Bassett,” returned the old lady, resuming her 
knitting-work, and speaking with external imperturbability, her 
eyes still directed slantwise at Sarell over her glasses. “An’ y’ 
need n’t take me in hand, no way. I ain’t a fool, as I ’ve ob- 
served t’ you afore. You ’ve got Hollis t’ look after, an’ that’s 
enough, though ’t won’t be, by a half a dozen o’ the same sort 
yet, I ’ll ventur t’ say ! ” 

Mrs. Bassett turned round, and faced the sidewise look 
squarely. She held her eyes stone-still upon it, even as it with- 
drew and dropped, with all her might for about ten seconds. 

“ Miss-es Pemble,” then she said, in a slow, strong monotone, 
that had such a tempest in it as low, long horizon thunder has, 
“ef you was up, I b’lieve my heart I sh’d knock you down !” 


362 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


“T ain’t wuth while, Sarell,” remarked Hollis, with quiet 
drawl, from the other side the open door, whither he had come 
round in pursuit of her through the keeping-room. “ I notice, 
commonly, that when a person needs knocking down they air 
down. Jess let ’em stay.” 

The husband and wife went off together. 

Care’line sat in the keeping-room by the big table, on the side 
next the passage to her mother’s door, — her usual place, within 
hearing. Her feet were up in a chair ; her lap was full of 
woollen rags that she was cutting for Mrs. Pemble’s rugwork. 
Quite incapable of any stir in her own nature, she looked with 
simple wonder upon other people’s “ breezes.” 

“You oughtn’t to mind ma, Sarell,” she said, with that slow, 
open-mouthed dwelling of hers upon the vowels, as the young 
woman addressed passed through beside her, with a red spot on 
either cheek, and her eyes still intense. “ She ’s an old lady, 
an’ you ’ve alwers hed sech a real good-natured dispersishin.” 

“You could spile the temper of a flat-iron, ef you kep’ it on 
the coals the clear durin’ time,” Sarell returned, going straight 
on into her kitchen. 

Moved by a mild sense of some anxiety that might come, 
Care’line, an hour later, carrying in a basket full of her cut rags 
to Mrs. Pemble, said smoothly, “ I don’t think, ma, Sarell means 
anything by her talk, an’ I would n’t notice if I was you. She ’s 
a real good care-taker, but then she ’s spunky, too ; an’ ’t would 
be bad now, you see, if she and Hollis was to take affront. 
There warn’t the least thing done in the house that you mis- 
trusted. What could be done, with me settin’ there, you 
know ? ” 

“ You ? Anything ! ” answered the old woman. “ ’Z long ’s 
they did n’t tumble over ye.” 

When Mother Pemble was spiteful to Care’line it had cer- 
tainly come to the last point with her. She felt it so herself ; 
the very “ revvet,” as she sometimes said of things, “ was out.” 
"What was there for her to hold together for, except her love — 
such as love was with her — for her daughter! 

When Care’line went comfortably and composedly from the 
room, “ taking no notice,” and too phlegmatic to take anything 


HOBGOBLINS. 


363 


to heart, the old woman dropped her arms lengthwise upon the 
bedclothes, as if in some vital point in her body between them 
the rivet had fallen out, turned her face away upon the pillow, 
and let two grieving tears run slowly out of her eyes, under her 
spectacles, upon her cheeks. 

But she was all alone. Nobody knew that Mother Pemble 
ever cried — even those two tears. 

Was it a thing defiant of and utterly contradictory to those 
two tears, or was it in some subtile connection with their 
spring, that, fifteen minutes afterward, Mother Pemble’s latch 
was down, and she, with a smooth, hard face, was sitting more 
upright against her pillows than before, doing that curious, 
slow work with her thin, flat file and the bit of steel at whose 
ridged end she rasped so steadily back and forth, back and 
forth 1 

One stormy evening later, in what the young wife called the 
“ new-married end of the house,” another bit of talk arose, in 
this wise. 

A bright fire burned in the round, oven-like fireplace of the 
buttery room. Sarell sat with her feet comfortably tilted 
against the raised edge of the brick hearth, whereon Hollis had 
drawn forth a goodly heap of live coals, and over them was pop- 
ping out little golden nuggets of corn into white roses. 

“ Do you believe in witches, or fetches, Sarell 1 ” he asked, 
suddenly. 

“ When I see ’em,” Sarell answered, in a safe ambiguity. 

“ Well, that ’s it. Do you believe it is ’em, if you do see 
’em 1 Ther ’s curious things enough — ” 

“ We all know that,” interrupted Sarell. “ Where folks stop, 
in most kinds o’ b’lievin’, is where you put the name to it. 
Why 1 ” 

“ Because, sittin’ here, an’ what Dr. Fargood said, puts me 
in mind of a circumstaance.” 

“Weill” 

“ It was last summer when we was gittin’ in hay from the 
overhill piece. We men-folks were all out there, an’ Elviry an’ 
Mrs. Newell was gone t’ the S’ciety. ’Bout an hour b’fore 
sundown the Deac’n he kinder stops an’ pushes up his hat an’ 


364 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


looks round fr a rest, an’ he sees ol’ Poke-ahontas, spite of her 
poke, sidlin’ with her long horns at the pastur’ bars lead’n’ into 
the oat-field. All the rest of the drove was at her heels. 

‘ Hurry up, Hollis, after them cattle ! ’ he says sharp. So I 
started ’n headed ’em off, ’n fixed the bars, ’n turned ’em 
down along the brook to’ads home. When I see ’em safe ’s fur 
’s the bridge, I came up over the knoll, where the woodchucks’ 
holes is. An’ ef I did n’t see three of ’em, settin’ up prim as 
dishes, ’longside o’ their front doors. I could n’t stand that, so 
I came on home to get a trap. An’ the minute I got my head 
over the gardin-ridge, I * took notice that the high door, 
out o’ this room, where the ol’ steps was, was swung open ; an’ 
on the sill, with her feet danglin’, was a woman in a ashy-col- 
ored gown an’ a black hank’chef over her head, eatin’ by the 
handful out of a berry-basket. ’F ’t wa’nt Betsey Bushell, I 
donno what it was. But when I ’d come out through the sweet 
corn an’ looked agin, d’ y’ b’lieve that door was clapped to, 
an’ no kind o’ a livin’ bein’ visible 1 I come right across the 
wall, an’ in at the shed, and through the house, and round jt 
all sides ; an’ neither up the road nor down, nor cross the fields, 
in all outdoors, was sign or track of anybody. I alwus thought 
’t was mighty singler ; an’ Betsey Bushell’s house ’s ben shut up, 
an’ she lost sight of most ever sence.” 

Sarell had listened intently. “ You did n’t mention it!'’ she 
asked, with point. 

“Well, no. I hurried an’ set my trap, an’ then back to 
drive up the hay load, an’ — I did n’t think ’t was worth 
while.” 

“No more ’t was n’t. Did y’ ketch y’r woodchuck 1 ” Her 
manner was light again. 

“ Yes, two of ’em. But what d’ you make out ’bout Betsey 
BushelH” 

“ I don’t make out. Mebbe ’t ’ll make itself out — ef its 
well let alone. Out-doors is a big place, though. The’ might 
be such a thing’s a needle in a haystack ; but ef I was in a hurry 
for it I don’t persume I should go fust to the haystack.” 

When Sarell turned oracular, and prescribed letting alone, 
the subject ended. Hollis assumed upon his check a voluntary 


HOBGOBLINS. 


8(55 


air, as if he saw he had given her as much to think of as 
was well at once, poured the last of the white roses out of the 
popper, and laid the oracle away in his mind. There was more 
witch-work about women than this woman was ever likely to 
help him fathom. 


366 


ODD. OE EVEN? 


CHAPTER XXXV. 

SHOWS AND DISQUIETS. 

Mrs. Fargood was very proud of Flip Merriweather’s letters. 
She had no children, and this young brother represented for 
her all that other matrons were ambitious of and jealous for in 
their sons. From the time he was ten years old, and used to 
come and stay with her in the long winters, up through his 
“schooling” days, and of late in the vexing uncertainty and 
impatience as to what his manhood should be and take hold of, 
— sometimes elated that he could do anything he would take 
hold of, and sometimes provoked and annoyed that he was in 
no hurry himself for aught except squirrels and partridges and 
pickerel, and river and mountain rambling, — she had made his 
development and disposal, as women will, her own continual 
concern of mind and plan of effort, hardly remembering that 
either he or Providence had also anything to say about it. 

“ Why can’t you be like those Heybrooks 1 ” she used to ask 
him, when he was a little boy, and afterward, when he was 
growing bigger. Until one day he answered her conclusively, 
“ Sister ! if you have n’t found out yet that I ainH those Hey- 
brooks and can’t be made into those Heybrooks, I might just as 
well tell you so as to let you keep on hammerin’. And as long 
as you pound, I sha’n’t get into any shape, theirn nor mine ! ” 

“ ‘ TheirSf Flip,” corrected Hannah Louisa meekly, recog- 
nizing, as women have to do, the masculine positivity, when it 
asserts itself, with whatever waywardness. 

Nevertheless, she was always secretly and restlessly compar- 
ing ; making a point, all the while, and for the very cause, of 
airing Flip’s best sayings and doings in Mother Heybrook’s 
ears, in talks at the sewing-circle, and calls at the farm. 

And Mother Heybvook — not advertising at all her boys’ 


SHOWS AND DISQUIETS. 


367 


superiority, of which her consciousness had grown so calm and 
prevailing a great while since as to have been beyond the tri- 
umph of mere instances — would say, with her gentle conces- 
sion, too kind to be satisfying, “ Flip ’s a smart boy, yes. Ef he 
only gits started right, I don’t doubt his doin’ well.” 

One surprised and admiring “ Well done!'' from the success- 
ful mother’s lips or eyes was Hannah Louisa’s most fervent 
ambition. 

So she came often to the farm this winter, when the after- 
noons were turning rosy with the low light along the snows, 
bringing her knitting-work and Philip’s last communications ; 
and sometimes, — often, — Israel Heybrook, seeing the doctor’s 
sleigh come winding along through the bit of plain into the 
Clark Hollow, would be with his mother in the warm, pleasant 
keeping-room when the visitor and her budget arrived. 

One day, therefore, he had listened to these paragraphs : — 

“ Tell about weddings, Hannah Louisa ! I rather think you ’d 
just like to have been in the big Church of the Epiphany the 
other night. There was a showing to the Gentiles that the 
meeting-house was n’t ever named for. Only there were n’t many 
Gentiles let in. 

“ In the first place, there was a carpet and an awning all the 
way from the great doors down the steps and across the side- 
walk ; and policemen each side to keep off the crowd. Then 
inside it was all blazing with lights, and the front of the chan- 
cel, that ’s the railed end, you know, where the minister does 
his part of the business, and the steps up to it, were full of 
plants in bloom, and heaps of flowers, such as you ’d say never 
did bloom out of the Garden of Eden. And there were eight 
fellows in such get-ups as come to pass only a long way down 
from Adam and the fig-leaves, and white favors of flowers and 
ribbons on their coat-lappets, travelling back and forth in the 
broad aisle at the allotment, I should say, of five or six miles 
apiece in the whole job, first and last, — handing people into 
their seats. 

“ People ! there ought to be some other word for it, when a 
crowd is like that. Velvet and satin and jewelry, and feathers 
and flowers and lace, and ribbons and trinkets of fans and 


368 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


things, and bouquets, and hair ! and smilings and noddings and 
rustlings and whisperings and leanings this way and that, — it 
was a kind of live ocean of gorgeousness with the spirit of ‘ all- 
this-is-us ’ moving about on the face of it. And a little, low 
music playing on the organ all the time. 

“ Then at last the organ hushed up, and so did the whispers, 
but there was more rustling than ever, because every head was 
turning round. And the ushers — those were the eight fellows 
— were all down at the doors, that were wide open. And pres- 
ently the organ started off with the big Wedding March, and 
the eight fellows came up two and two through the aisle again, 
and stood round, scattering, each side of the chancel, among the 
flowers, and behind them came the bride’s mother with the 
bridegroom ; and after them the bride’s father with the bride, 
and now I ’ll mention that they were Mr. and Mrs. George H. 
Everidge, and Miss Euphemia Everidge and a Mr. Sampson 
Kaynard, who has n’t got much Sampson about him, I guess, 
except his name, and maybe the same kind of a jaw-bone be- 
longing to him. 

“ Of course I don’t dare to stop without telling you what the 
bride had on. She was dressed in white satin, with velvet 
borderings and a kind of workery of silver flowers ; and the rest 
of the stuff that she could n’t get on filled up the aisle behind 
her, like a drift of snow along Thumble’s sides, just frozen over 
and shiny, and edged off with some that was new-fallen and all 
full of little icy sparkles, so that when she knelt down to be 
married, she was a clear heap of snow and frosty flowers and 
white veil like a fog, and just her face and the edges of her 
hair, and one hand with a great round bunch of real white lilies 
in it, to make her out by. I should say it was enough to scare 
a fellow to swear up to such a panorama of a woman as that ! 

“ But they came down the aisle presently, a good deal as if 
nothing particular had happened to them since they went up. 
And then the ushers began handing the people out again. The 
family first, like mourners. I forgot to say that four of them 
had led in the four sisters last of all before they went down the 
middle and up again to fetch the bridal party. And the pret- 
tiest sight of the whole, to my mind, was our Miss France, in a 


SHOWS AND DISQUIETS. 


369 


dress just the color of a blush rose, and not too much of it, but 
sort of folded round her as a bud folds itself up, and her face 
looking real sweet and not a bit proud. Not even so proud as 
it used to look sometimes at Fellaiden. When she came out 
again, her eyes were wet and her lips trembled. 

“ It was Oliver Bannian that took her, — both times. He is 
one of the big Bannians out at Oldwood. There ’s lots of them. 
Oldwood ’s all Bannians, and they ’ve got no end of money 
amongst them. Just buy up the biggest thing that ’s going 
and make it bigger. They say Oliver ’s after France, but that 
don’t make out anything. There ’s a dozen more that ’s that. 
He was round her all that evening, anyway. I was at the re- 
ception, with the Miss Pyes. That was France’s doing too, for 
clerks and shippers don’t count in those lots usually. 

“ I can’t tell you any more about it ; it ’s too long a story. 
I stepped about amongst the extra drygoods piled round on the 
floors, and heard a lot of trash talked, and just one thing that 
was worth while to remember or say over, and that was. Miss 
France said it to Mr. Oliver Bannian. 

“ ‘ You ’ll miss your sister,’ says he, just making talk, and 
eating ice-cream as fast as he could swallow. ‘ Specially out of 
that awfully jolly, little evening room of yours.’ 

“ She looked back quick at him, as if he had called her away 
from something else that she was thinking of, ‘ I don’t think I 
miss people,’ she said in that clear, even way of hers, with a 
kind of bell-note to her voice. ‘ What they are to me is al- 
ways there.’ 

“ They say the old man has given Mrs. Kaynard twenty 
thousand right out, and she had flve thousand dollars’ worth of 
presents. 

“ That ’s all about that. 

“ Tell Sam Baxter he ’d better stay where he is, unless he ’ll 
come along with his axe and his overalls, and do dowm here the 
thing he can do first-rate up there. I know a man will give 
him one-fifty a cord for chopping and piling, and Sam can do 
three cords a day. It takes something that a fellow can do 
v'ith his two hands, and then for him to take hold and do it, 
and beat every time, to make a place nowadays. You can’t get 

24 


370 


ODD, OIC EVEN ? 


places. Folks here ain’t crying for country bone and sinew to 
come and grab their soft business. There ’s a crowd of chaps 
now, standing in platoons, miles deep, round the cities, all 
educated and dressed up ahead of their chances, with their 
hands in their pockets, waiting for the professions and the 
banks and the railroad companies and the rings in trade and 
stocks and the old, settled firms to cry out for ’em. But they 
don’t do it. The sides are all made up, and the game ’s in the 
middle. Daniel Webster said there was ‘ room enough at the 
top.’ There is n’t now. And there was n’t for him, before he 
got through. Things are top-heavy. The country has manufac- 
tured more Presidents than it will ever have any use for. 

“ I suppose Sam will say I talk smart now I ’ve got what I 
wanted myself. But I can tell him it ’s a long look ahead, and 
through the woods, yet. And I shouldn’t have got it if 1 
hadn’t known just one little thing of my own better than 
most folks. I knew how to catch a pickerel.” 

Israel sat through all this to the end, notwithstanding that 
he had a great impulse to rise up and escape from it in the 
middle. When he had heard it, he found that it all had some 
point of meaning for himself ; and when finally he did get up 
with his sober quietness, and say to his mother, “ I ’m going 
up to East Centre, mother ; anything to send or say 1” he went 
away with three things to think of besides his own direct busi- 
ness and Mrs. Heybrook’s little errand. 

First, — His own plan and ambition in life, that had been 
turned back upon him here, and that still, spite of his noble 
way of taking the alternative, and making noble work of it, 
would now and then lift itself out of that shadowy “might 
have been,” insisting upon fresh comparison, and reiteration of 
the judgment and motive that had kept it down. 

Flip Merriweather was right : there were more men educated 
for top places now than there were top places to fill. He 
might never have worked into such professional life as would 
have satisfied him. He would not have stood in those pla- 
toons with his hands in his pockets. He should have come 
back to the farm, very likely, any way. But the dear knowl- 
edge that he wanted ! If he could have had full time for that. 


SHOWS AND DISQUIETS. 


371 


To have made himself a little more equal with the best, and 
then to have put the best, if need be, into his plain work, 
through which it would come to whatever there was for it, 
though the game out there, for the dollar-and-cent chances, 
were all made up ! And Lyman, too, — the boy who had a gift 
of his own, that he could follow better than most, and for 
which there was place enough wherever men and women bore 
the burden and suffering of the body. 

It was wrong, somehow, that made any real hindrance. 

It was wrong and greed, down there among the cities, that 
kept any real power from finding honest room to w’ork in, in 
this world of powers meant to unfold into things its poor, 
selfish human economies had not conceived of. 

So he turned the old problem over in his mind, a matter 
partly put by and done with for himself, but present and press- 
ing, pressing down and hard, on others. 

Above all this rose the fresh vision of France Everidge. 

“What people are to me is always there,” she had said. 
There were both sweetness and sting for him in that. She was 
his friend ; she knew that he was hers. They had promised 
each other that. He knew it would stand ; that what he was 
to her was there. But only her friend. She had taken such 
care of that. 

And she did not “ miss ” people. She was satisfied, in this 
faith of hers, that where she left them, there she could find 
them, and take them up again. Perhaps that was how a wo- 
man is different in her friendships from a man. Or can a 
woman have a friendship beyond where, to a man, it remains 
possible 1 He missed her ; he wanted her, — her, of all the 
world ; not “ there,” but here ! 

Was he to put by this also 1 

Was it not by, far by, already ? She, among those grand, 
luxurious people, that Phil said shrewdly ought not to be called 
by the name of the mass at all ; “ dozens after her ” who could 
deck and surround her and shut her off like this : was not she 
gone by from him, like all the rest of it 1 She 1 It was no longer 
she alone, as she had been here in the sweet hills, separated 
from her splendor and her obligation. People who could marry 


372 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


their daughters like that, — what could he ever have to ask of 
them ? He had been a fool. 

Graver, severer in its gravity, than usual, his face was, as he 
went through with Mr. Kingsworth presently some parish plans 
and lists ; even as he talked with Leonora about the new Mon- 
day evening class, for the foreign tour with the stereopticon, and 
the great sleigh that was to go round and pick up such as 
had n’t their own ways for coming. 

“We are going to make it so gradual and real,” Miss Kings- 
worth said. “We are to have two evenings of sailing and 
seafaring and arrival scenes ; there is one of icebergs, and one 
of a storm, and one of a lovely great ocean sunset ; and then 
there are the Irish headlands, and the Channel pictures, and 
the going up the Mersey. It won’t be much faster than Cook, 
and not half so confusing. Only one of these days they will 
all find themselves talking about ‘ when we were in Scotland,’ 
and ‘when we went down through Warwickshire,’ and ‘the 
night we arrived in Paris.’ Those lighted bridges and quays, 
and the boulevards and the shops, are just the very identities 
themselves. Bernard — but does your head ache, Mr. Hey- 
brook ? ” she broke off to ask suddenly, with the sweetest 
directness and simplicity. 

Then Israel smiled as he thanked her, and assured her not; 
but she saw some sort of weariness or ache in the smile, and 
wondered if he had n’t something he would like to say to Ber- 
nard ; so she was gone, presently, out of the room, without 
having made any least little demonstration of her going. 

“ What is it, Eael 1 ” his friend asked then. 

“ Only the ‘ vain show ’ of things,” returned Israel, with the 
same slow smile. “ I feel sometimes as if w’e only got the 
pictures of living.” 

“ I am learning to be thankful for the pictures,” Bernard 
said. “ It is a thing one has to learn. But I think I know that 
my Father shows me nothing except what He has in his mind to 
give me, sometime. Not in the mere first shape, perhaps, in 
which He has to make me see it ; but in what Leo calls the 
‘ identity.’ ‘ Then I shall be satisfied, when I shall awake in 
His likeness.’ When I get my full consciousness, and find that 


SHOWS AND DISQUIETS. 373 

it is in the verity of that of which He has given me the 
image.” 

“ I believe you do feel so, Mr. Kingsworth. And I believe 
you have the right.” 

“ You have the same, Rael.” 

Rael was silent. 

“ It is the right of the thirsty.” 

“ We are all that, I suppose.” 

“ Yes. And so the pledge is to all, — ‘ Let him that is 
athirst come.’ ‘ Every one that thirsteth, without money, and 
without price.’ So that one has no right, over another. ‘ Who- 
soever will, let him come, and drink of the water of life 
freely.’ ” 

“ But that is the water of life, — spiritual life, I suppose.” 

“ What else has life but the spirit 1 It is just whatever we 
are thirsty for, in these souls that love and question, and want 
to have and know. It is our satisfying; it is what meets the 
need we are suffering from, the present experience of the 
spirit. It is a real thing ; it is only set in an image so far as 
that which has the keenest bodily likeness to it is chosen for a 
sign to us of how perfect the satisfying shall be, — the satisfy- 
ing the thirst is given for.” 

“ But it is not earthly ; it is righteousness.” 

“Isn’t that what you are craving fori That things should 
be made right with you 1 You have got a certain way beyond 
any wish for good that cannot come righteously 1 You would 
not lift your hand to take a thing, though you wanted it ever 
so much, that it would not be honest to take 1 ” 

“No,” said Rael. “I want nothing that does not belong to 
me. But what does, I do want.” 

“ Exactly. And to know righteously what it is. That is 
what God means to show us, and then give.” 

“ Not in this world’s things.” 

“ In everything that begins in this world and reaches on out 
of it. Don’t separate God’s righteousnesses ; and don’t try to 
separate soul from its own body that He giveth it. He will not 
take away any single right good from you to give you any 
other. When yon come to think so about all, not to want 


374 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 

■what you cannot honestly, according to perfect honors and 
values, in the ‘ measure of an angel,’ have, then the Lord’s 
prayer will be consummated in you, and the Will be done in the 
earthly things as, and because, it is done in the heavenly. 
There can be no mistake. It is the perfect Law of Righteous 
ness.” 

“ For the converted.” 

“ When you turn to God’s will, you are converted. He is 
converting us all the time. Not aioay from anything; but in 
and through the absolute whole of us, here and now, as well as 
then and there.” 

“ And we see things, that would have been a whole life to us, 
go past us, and away from us. They do go, Mr. Kingsworth. 
You cannot say they don't.” 

Rael spoke with a hard tone, almost like a bitter challenge. 

Bernard Kingsworth answered him in a voice that sounded 
out of a far, sweet calm, as strong as any bitter despair could 
be. 

“They do go; and they — or what they foreshadowed — 
come again to us. Nothing comes near us, but on a divine and 
bountiful errand.” 

“ I have wanted,” said Rael, carried out of his reserve, as if 
he had been talking with a spirit, “ what a man only wants once, 
with all there is of him, — and it is going by.” 

After Rael said this, there came a brief pause between them. 

When Bernard spoke, it was with a tone just changed for the 
deeper, but none the less calm, none the less strong. 

“ I have gone through that, Rael. What I wanted, or thought 
I must have, has gone by ; but neither of us knows what is 
waiting, coming, for him, or where. It is with the Desire that 
is greater for us than our own.” 

The two men held their hands out to each other ; they met 
in a firm clasp. There was no more for two men to say ; their 
confidences are not as the confidences of women. 

Rael Heybrook took up his hat, and went away. 

Bernard Kingsworth followed him to the outer door, and said 
good-night ; then he came back to his study, and shut himself 
in, in the twilight. 


« 


SHOWS AND DISQUIETS. 375 

He had not been passive all these nionths ; he had been ques- 
tiuning, discerning, quietly recollecting, many things. 

He had not stayed away from Fellaideu simply because the 
girl was there who had hurriedly refused his first asking. She 
had involuntarily done more than that. 

Now this was the plain other half to the problem. If it had 
never been certain before, it could not be otherwise now. Only 
— he could quite clearly see, in his honest courage to see — the 
two halves had failed, somehow, to join themselves. 

Was that any responsibility, now it had been shown to him, 
of hisi 

Noblesse oblige. 

There is something mightier than a bom name, — there is a 
born soul and desire of nobleness. He had already acted upon 
it, when he had answered Rael Heybrook that he also had 
“ wanted, with all that there was of him,” and that his own wish 
had gone by. In that very moment, at last, it did utterly go 

by. 

In that righteousness, in the heart of that perfect wish and 
will for him, whatever else there might be, it was made plain to 
him now that it was not “ this thing, so dear, so sweet.” 

In just this giving of it, it might be for those other two, but 
AOt for him. And this righteousness was actually and vitally, 
as he had preached it, greater and dearer to him than selfish 
fulfilling. His “ preaching and praying ” were truly “ the same 
word.” He had never “ made known ” to his people what had 
not first and truly been “ made known ” between him and his 
Father. 

Let the will be done, then. He was soul-valiant enough to 
hope, — to ask for it, — laying his own will and joy down at the 
feet of his Lord. 

And we know that whoso layeth his life down there, taketh 
it again. 


376 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


CHAPTER XXXVL 

DRIFT. 

After Christmas, the Everidges moved into town. 

They took a lovely furnished house in “Westmoreland,” with 
four rooms and a conservatory on the first floor. The little par- 
lor between the drawing-room and conservatory, blinded to day- 
light by a blank wall, but exquisite in the evening with gaslight 
and olive and old-gold furnishings in simple cloth, with a Stein- 
way in the deep alcove that made the apartment L-shaped, and 
a stand of flowers, that never blossomed there, but was replen- 
ished every w^eek from the florist’s, filling up the introspective 
bay-window on the long side, was the young ladies’ evening- 
room. 

Now France set her face against this evening-room, just as 
she had done against the one in their house out of town, — only 
with more emphasis, inasmuch as city receptions were more ex- 
tended and pronounced than the same sort of things in the coun- 
try. She never sat there, except purely to oblige Helen ; and 
she would not do that when only young men called, so that, as 
Helen said, what did her obliging amount to 1 Poor Helen was 
sadly discomfited by the spokes in her wheels that France’s in- 
creasing oddities kept inserting. “ If she had n't any sister ! ” 
she said. “ But to go off and make a point of receiving alone, 
when France was out there in the library with papa and mamma, 
and when it was just exactly the good of there being two of 
them ! ” 

But France said, “ I don’t like this separating of visits. Why 
shouldn’t the girls want to talk with mamma? She is better 
company than any of us. And as to gentlemen, — I think it is 
simply vulgar to receive them by ourselves. As if so much 


DRIFT. 37T 

more were meant than there is, — or we were determined there 
should be ! ” 

“ Pray do drop the ‘gentlemen,’ France ! ” put in Mrs. Samp- 
son Kaynard, who was taking tea with her sisters. “ Nobody 
says it. The ‘gentlemen’ are all behind the small counters 
now, and the ‘ ladies ’ work at Fitzrinkle &, Chorker’s, and go 
out to their one o’clock apple-pie and coffee with rolls of music 
in their hands ! There are only men in our set.” 

“ I don’t see why a lady should not work at Fitzrinkle & 
Chorker’s, if she has occasion,” said incorrigible France, ignoring 
the men. 

“ Exactly,” returned Euphemia. “ It is the rolls of music we 
object to; so we don’t carry rolls of music any more. Enid 
Upperton had a two-page song sent home the other day. She 
said she would sooner carry a market-basket.” 

“ What do you think France said to somebody the other 
night, who asked if he might call 1 ” 

“What did you say, France?” laughed Mrs. Kaynard, who 
did not wish to push too far into earnest, and who was rather 
proud of her sister’s odd independence, and retailed a good 
many of her trenchant sayings where she chose herself to op- 
pose, for her own convenience, some conventionality. 

“ 0, you can laugh ; you ’re well out of it,” said Helen, with 
something as near sullenness as an elegant girl allows herself. 

“ France, nobody shall tell tales of you but yourself. What 
did you say 1 ” persisted Euphemia. 

“ I suppose I know what she means. I told Mr. Ralph Mad- 
dison — ” 

“ That handsome New-Yorker ! ” 

“ That we should be happy to see him. But I begged him to 
come early in the evening, for mamma kept early hours, and we 
did not like to disturb her ways.” 

“ Which was the same,” Helen remarked in a crushing tone, 
“ as if she had said, ‘ and don’t stay long ; and don’t imagine we 
care to see you on our own account.’” 

“ Ralph Maddison ! ” repeated Mrs. Kaynard. 

“ I knew you ’d be shocked. That was why I did n’t over- 
whelm you with the name at first. But that ’s the way she goes 


378 ODD, OR EVEN ? 

on ; and now she ’s putting her back up at the notion of young 
dinner-parties.” 

“ No,” said France. “ Only that there should n’t be a dinner- 
party here, I thought, at which papa and mamma did not pre- 
side.” 

“ France, they all do it,” said Euphemia, with urgent asser- 
tion. “ The Copseley Bannians are in town, and the girls have 
given two or three dinners of their own, already. Young Mrs. 
Banuian Chute is there, to be sure, and takes the lead ; but 
they never have the old people.” 

“ Do they take their dinner in the nursery, — the old people, 
I meanl” asked France, with simplicity. 

“ Pshaw ! Don’t try to run against all the world, France, 
There are always rooms enough. Why should n’t young people 
be young 1 Nell, I ’ll come any time, and matronize ; and you ’ll 
see how nice the new way is,” she added, to the refractory 
younger sister. 

“No, I shall not, Effie. While I live in my father’s house, 
and at his table, I shall eat my dinners with him, even if he 
had nothing to say about it, which I think he will.” 

Mrs. Kaynard diverted the subject. “ The Bannians, and all 
their set, are just wild about Anna Maddisou. Do you think she 
is such a beauty, Nell 1 ” 

“ She has n’t the first bit of beauty — regularly. She has 
effect. It is all that brazen-brown hair of hers, and her general 
picturesqueness and the face-play and the little turns and ges- 
tures. She ’s dramatic.” 

“ A girl deserves more credit for that kind of beauty than for 
born beauty, I think,” said Euphemia. 

“ Credit ! ” France was surprised into the exclamation. She 
did not mean to be priggish, or to put down everything ; but 
that word had something in it that hurt her, as wpll as moved 
her scorn. She felt as if everything were being already put 
down — cheapened. Was that how a girl’s ways were to be 
looked at and accounted fori It took away all the ideal sweet- 
ness of a woman’s being and doing. Getting herself up, — 
achieving beauty, or something more distinguishing ; aiming 
consciously at what should be spontaneous and native, to be 


DRIFT. 


379 


anything ; studying it all the time, and almost avowing it as 
study ; not ashamed to take praise and admiration for it. 
Was this what was true of a class, having “that kind of 
beauty ” 1 And other women giving credit ! It really seemed 
as if it were demanded to make one creditable, like having styl- 
ish gowns. 

“ There goes France’s nose again,” said Helen. “ It ’s got 
the very tip of Miss Ammah’s. You can’t say the first thing 
before her. She ’s always deprecating. She ’s always sitting on 
twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel. She ’s born 
into the wrong world.” 

“ France is preoccupied. She has got some world of her own, 
real or imaginary. She brings everything into some sort of 
comparison. I can see her do it. She ’s more like an engaged 
girl than a girl with a fate to find out. She ’s awfully settled.” 

Axminster carpets and portieres are convenient things for all 
the little refinements of human nature, when it would like to 
act out gently its primitive moods. Before Euphemia had 
ended her sentence, France, without the opening or shutting of 
a door, or the sound of a footstep, had withdrawn herself. 

“ Now she ’s offended,” said Helen bluntly. 

“ No,” returned France’s clear voice from the wide, square 
hall outside, as she moved on quietly toward the small back 
drawing-room through its open folding-doors. “ Only put out, 
into the third person. The third person discreetly facilitates 
the conversation.” And she passed across into the library 
beyond, shutting its door half to behind her as she entered, and 
went over and sat down by the bright fire. 

She wanted something from outside that should overbear the 
hot color in her cheeks. In the dim little evening-room, the 
gas not yet lighted, the others had not known of it. And she 
had kept her voice so absolutely cool. But she took herself to 
task now as to why, and precisely when it had come up. 

She knew quite well ; it had begun, absurdly, with just that 
sudden word, “ Israel.” And it had gone on, flaming intenser 
from some deeper feeding, as ESie’s speech went on. 

It was not vexation : it was conviction. 

She was odd ; she knew that ; it was because she had been at 


380 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


odds ; there was something true in Helen’s saying, “ she is born 
into the wrong world.” At any rate, she was not yet born into 
her right one. And this world around her, and she in it, were 
growing more at odds than ever. She felt herself cranky and 
jarring; that was the way it was coming upon her, she sup- 
posed ; that was the way people turned into old maids, the odd 
women. Yes ; she was very likely to be an old maid. 

And with that the color surged up again. 

Only for that little while last summer, she had been, or had 
been growing, at evens with things. Among those true, sim- 
ple people, in the presence of those mighty, sweet realities of 
God’s world, just as He had made it, she had been running 
with, not against, the current of the days. Here it was all 
crisscross again. And she had no hold there ; and here she 
was held fast. She had no right to expect ever to have the way 
made for her to go to Fellaiden again. And what of Fellaiden 
w'ould ever come down here, now 1 

She remembered, thinking of the crisscross, what she had 
heard Mother Heybrook say one day, concerning some affairs 
that were spoken of. It had been the nearest she had ever 
heard her come to direct censure of anybody. “Everything 
goes so with them alwers ; their luck is alwers in a snarl,” 
that was what Mother Heybrook replied to. She said in her 
gentle way, “ When things go crisscross with people, alwers, 
it’s most likely they’ve took a cross-track somewhers their- 
selves, — or some of their folks,” — putting the blame as far 
back, and making it as impersonal, as she could. “But it 
don’t go alwers, ever,” she added, brightening up into the great 
final hope that softened and smoothed all with her. “ The 
wdiole thread is n’t in any snarl.” 

Yes, Effie had touched it. She was preoccupied. What 
had been merely restless half-satisfaction once was a definite 
weighing and finding wanting, now. She was bringing every- 
thing into comparison. How had Efiae known so much, knowing 
no more 1 

She had been so near real people, who meant every bit of 
their lives, that it was quite impossible to come back into tire- 
some, trivial, little social aj>pearances, little ambitions and 


DKIFT. 381 

laboriugs to make things seem a certain way. Behind the 
seeming, what was there 1 

She brought everything to that measure, — yes, it was the 
measure of a man. She had learned it in him. That very 
name, Israel, the name of her friend, had power in its merest 
chance sound and mention. Was she ashamed of that 1 

She was neither ashamed nor vexed ; but she was convicted. 

This friend, what was she to do henceforth without him ? He 
had become to her her Great Pyramid ; the sign and token for 
her, yes, to the Lord of hosts, in this laud of Egypt. 

And yet, here she was without him. She had put this win- 
ter, how much more she could not know, between him and her. 
And while he was inward sign and strength to her, they were 
none the less drifting apart. 

Drifted apart in so short a time, and with that promise of 
friendship between them 1 

What people are to us may be always there, but there may 
be long, sorrowful times of missing them nevertheless, through 
not having apprehended, in the day of its grace, just what that 
belonging ought to have been. 

Life-drift is like the drift of the sea : you think you have just 
struck out a few arms’ lengths from the shore ; you think it is 
close behind you there, and that you can turn back to its safety 
and rest at any minute ; you would n’t else have cast yourself 
into the waves. But you are floating, floating ; and the tide is 
setting out ; it is carrying yoti away from reach ; your safe, 
sweet shore is lost ; you shall never return to it. 

Flip Merriw'eather had shown her a letter ; there had been 
these words in it : “ Rael did not stay long enough to be spoken 
to. He’s always off now. He’s all taken up at the parsonage.” 

Was Rael drifting, changing, away from what she knew he 
had been for that little while 1 Was the one point of all their 
lives at which they could have come nearest each other passed, 
leaving only the vague result of “ friendship,” that may hold 
and let go what it will 1 

She had done it herself. She had put all those chances 
between. She had told him, with that marked reservation, 
that he might be her friend. 


382 


ODD, OR EVEN V 


She wondered if Fellaideu itself were there yet, just that 
hundred and fifty miles off, — Fellaiden, with the snows upon 
it, as she had wished that she might see it 1 

She wondered if next summer Miss Ammah would, by any 
possibility, ask her again; and if not, what would ever come 
of all the last summer, — the only piece of her life that had been 
vitally lived. 

This was the way, of course, that people turned into old 
maids. 

And then Mother Heybrook’s sweet, old, patient voice made 
itself heard again in the spirit : “ It don't go so alwers. The 
whole thread is n’t in any snarl.” 

What then ? The thread has to break sometimes, or to be 
reeled slowly off, through loops and catches of trouble, some 
backward, different way. The thread may be kept safe ; true, 
but these years of our lives are the winding. 


TWENTY QUESTIONS. 


383 


CHAPTER XXXVII. 

TWENTY QUESTIONS. 

Mr. Kingsworth wrote a letter to Miss Ammah telling her 
of all these things. “ Is there nothing we can do about it 1 
... I feel the burden of a power that I cannot use. Rael 
Heybrook is so proud. . . . Dear friend, do you at all know 
the mind of Miss Everidger’ These were fragments of his 
sentences. 

“ That ’s a man that needs translating,” Miss Ammah said 
aloud, in the solitude of her own room at the Berkeley, when 
she had read Bernard’s three pages. “ I don’t mean,” she cor- 
rected in the ear of vacancy, “ interpreting, — though that ’s 
another fact to most minds, — but taking off the planet. And 
I ’m afraid if he gets all the help that belongs to him, it will 
happen.” 

“ Take Lyman in hand,” she wrote back to her friend. “That 
will ease your mind, and Rael can’t refuse for his brother. You 
can do it ‘ gradooal ’ as they say up there. ... As to France 
Everidge’s mind, she has got to come to it herself.” 

At this moment. Miss Ammah Tredgold would not have put 
one straw in the way to turn Frances Everidge’s mind in this 
direction or in that. She liked the girl heartily. She grew on 
to like her more than any other “young person with character 
forming ” that she could “ get and give with.” But France 
was getting more than belonged to her. 

Why should it be both of them 1 Either would have done 
munificently. “And if she should have the impertinence — 
yes, that ’s just the word, look in Webster for that ! ” she said 
again peremptorily to unretorting silence — “not to take either 
of them ! ” 

This mood of Miss Ammah’s was precisely coincident with 


E34 ODD, OR EVEN ? 

France’s own settling in her mind that she was to be an old 
maid. 

I suppose every girl has had some period in her life in which 
she has fixed this matter in like manner with herself, and begun, 
as it were, to make her will concerning the things of life that 
she has been interested in, and the future disposal of her 
energies. 

France could not believe in aesthetics and high art as a cult. 
She had no distinct Woman-Emancipation-and-Expansion the- 
ories of her own or ready-made. She had not been trained to 
a self-sacrifice that had led her into any formed plans of benefi- 
cence ; and, as she had permitted Sarell Gately to deduce, 
she was “ not religious.” And a Boston girl must have some- 
thing for an ideal and a finality. Style and fashion she de- 
spised more bitterly than they deserved, perhaps ; but it was the 
sort of style and fashion that she had seen. 

Do not think, girl-reader, that I am asserting or implying 
that in the world of wealth and elegance there are not women 
of lovely life, who wear these things as they wear their clothes, 
because they are there to put on, and it does not lie in their 
way to use homespun; but close to and intermixed with the 
range of such lives, that simply grow where they were put, 
realizing the greater demand laid upon them because their out- 
ward things are made easy and beautiful, there is a little under- 
world that makes a seeking and a business of its uprising into 
the externalities in which alone it discerns the life above it, 
verily supposing it to stir and feel only in its cuticle as itself 
does ; that strives for the putting on, not the putting forth, — 
for the raiment, and not the righteousness that may be in the 
raiment ; not knowing that to find the first shall be to have the 
clothing of it in “the things” that the Father sees are needful 
for its most beautiful revelation. 

A girl like France could be very restless in this raiment- 
seeking world, and yet not altogether lifted up and made alive 
in a higher. 

She took more than ever to the society of Miss Ammah, whom 
she really loved, beside that she represented to her now all that 
had at once blessed and disorganized her, — represented, also. 


TWENTY QUESTIONS. 


385 


all chance or connection for her yet to come with the strange, 
sweet life she had had one summer dream of. “ Too,” to use 
Mother Heybrook’s phraseology, she “ sororized,” in her erratic 
way, when the erratic impulse was upon her, with the sisters at 
the Pyes’ Nest, mostly “to see how it would seem,” she pre- 
tended to herself. But here also was a live link with Fellaiden. 

She was always ready to be the one for a day at “ the place,” 
when directions were to be sent to the servants there, or things 
that were done with were to be taken out and properly be- 
stowed at home, and other things found and put together that 
were wanted for town. On these days she often ran down to 
lunch, or stopped for an early tea, with the kind old Misses 
Chat and Bab and Mag. “ I think one of these days,” she said 
one afternoon there, “ I shall set up for a Prodigal Daughter. 
I shall ask for the goods coming to me, and go to housekeeping 
with them. It is so nice to have a Nest. I don’t see why a 
woman must needs be married to have that. I shall want to 
do things. I honor my father and my mother, but I can’t 
always be just the fringe to their tapestry. I ’ve got to be 
made into some kind of cloth myself, dr go all to ravellings. I 
may turn good, and take in paupers, and I could n’t do that in 
mamma’s house. Can’t a woman be an individuality, unless 
she goes into a profession or on a platform or has a studio 1 
Why can’t she have a vocation for independent domesticity, 
without waiting for all her dear relations to die and leave her 
their money? I really do want to go to housekeeping.” 

“ It would be awfully queer of you,” said Miss Mag, with her 
deep-dropping emphasis. ''•Everybody would say so ! ” 

“ Then why is n’t it exactly three times queerer for Miss 
Chat and Bab and you?” 

“ Why ! There are three of us ; and you are one, all sole 
alone. And it happened for us.” 

“ Three times one are three,” replied France gravely. 
“ That ’s what I said. And why should n’t we make things 
happen, — one thing as well as another, I mean, and with- 
out calamities?” 

Miss Mag gave a little nervous twitch, and said, a trifle dully 
and mechanically, “ You ’re so funny ! To go away from your 

25 


'386 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


family, and have a house, — without any family of your own! 
I don’t really believe anybody ever heard of such a thing.” 

Miss Mag did not in the least suppose the girl to be serious, 
but she always felt that a proposition had to be argued, how- 
ever absurd, on the face of its own presentation. 

“I don’t see why I should n’t have a house,” persisted 
France. 

“ But no family ! ” 

“ I don’t see why I should n’t have a family.” 

“ My gracious ! ” Miss Mag’s emphasis was strong again. 
“ What an odd girl you are ! What would Chat and Bab say 1” 

“I could choose my family, — from time to time, or even 
altogether. It might be part of my own family, at the times ; 
or it might be out of the highways and hedges ; and then per- 
haps it would have to be altogether.” 

“ I don’t think you know what you are talking about ; and I 
guess you would have a nest 1 ” said Miss Mag, glancing around 
at the China jars and the easels and the cloisonne plates and 
the maci'am^ fringes. And then that little nervous twitch came 
again, as if something hurt her. 

“I don’t suppose I do,” France acquiesced with a sudden 
sigh, changing her mood. “ I could n’t make a nest like this, 

— and I’m not good enough for the other ! ” and some reflex 
meaning in her own words started a tremble in her voice as she 
ended. 

“Now you’re in earnest,” said Miss Mag, laying her hands 
and her knitting-work down in her lap, with a half-stitch on the 
needles. “ Now you ’re queerer than ever ! ” • 

“ Where are the other ladies 1 ” asked France, with just as 
abrupt a return to her ordinary manner. 

Miss Mag answered her in a tone quite as suddenly changed 
as her own. “ Chat ’s got one of her nervous headaches, and 
Bab is sitting with her. Chat has been rather miserable lately 

— and — what did you half cry for, France! You’ve set me 
out, and I can’t stop.” 

And to France’s consternation. Miss Mag’s head went down 
recklessly among her knitting needles, and she sobbed hysteri- 
cally. 


TWENTY QUESTIONS. 


387 


They had both been getting very queer, certainly. 

France was sobered from whatever had been whimsical in her 
talk ; she was half ashamed of her own solicitudes that had 
been under the nonsense, the solicitudes of her twenty years, 
when here was this woman of near half a century, not lived 
through or calmed down from all her troubles yet. In the 
midst of this generous self-shame came the involuntary appli- 
cation of a conclusion, whimsical as any, that there was no 
escape, even into old maidism. 

“ Dear Miss Margaret ! ” she went up to her, and put her 
hand on her shoulder. “What is it 1 You were tired, and I 
have worried you. I ’m so sorry ! ” 

“Yes, — never mind, — that was it ; that was all,” said Miss 
Mag, shaking up her head again, and making extraordinary 
creases — that could never have come from her way of sleeping, 
but rather, a good many of them, from a way of not sleeping, 
lately, perhaps — in her limp cheeks, with trying to laugh 
before the quiver of the cry was over, “That was all, and it’s 
no matter, I don’t mean! — worried mel No, you didn’t. 
There, — don’t say anything more about it. If I talk I shall 
make a mess ; and it is n’t really anything. Chat and Bab 
would n’t have me behave so for the world.” 

France could but let her compose herself her own way ; but 
when she was composed, and they had managed a few minutes’ 
talk without any queerness in it except the customary queer- 
ness of saying anything rather than what is most vividly in the 
mind, she bade good-by, leaving a kind message for the 
other sisters, and walked away to the station, meeting Flip 
Merriweather on her way down. 

Him she took by the hand eagerly. “ Could you turn 
round % ” she asked. “ There is n’t a minute to spare for the 
five o’clock in ; and you could take the half-past out again. I 
want to speak to you,” 

Flip Merriweather would have turned round if it had been 
over Niagara. They got into the last car, and took the last 
seat. There is no better place for a special talk, with a few 
vacant places between the talkers and anybody else ; and this 
car was half empty. 


388 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


“Now I shall ask you right out,” said France. “Is anything 
the matter at the Nestl What ails Miss Magi” 

“ Go on,” said Flip. “ Ask more questions, — twenty ques- 
tions. Perhaps there ’ll come one I can answer. I don’t feel 
authorized to pile in a whole general subject till I’m close 
cornered. But I ’m glad you ’ve begun.” 

“ Is it Miss Chat’s head 1” 

“ That ’s some way olF, but, — yes, I should say it w^as.” 

“ Is she very bad 1 ” 

“She’s the best woman in the world, except Bab and Mag. 
Don’t get off the line.” 

“ What ’s the matter with her head 1 ” 

“ ’T aint level, — or was n’t.” 

“ 0 Philip ! Have they made any mistake 1 Is it money 1 ” 

“ Fes,” Philip answered emphatically. “ I should say it was ; 
and now you are coming to it. Go on ; I w’on’t begin anything. 
Get it out of me, if you can.” 

Tickets!” and of course France’s trip-ticket was at the 
bottom of her bag, and it was fully a minute and a half before 
it was found and the injured conductor had punched it. 

“ Oh, we ’re losing so much time ! Do tell me, Philip ! Is 
the money lost 1 ” 

“ Nothing’s lost when you know where it is.” 

“ Where is it 1 ” 

“ Hercules Mining Company. Kemember, you catechized 
me.” 

“And is anything the matter with the Hercules Mining 
Company 1 ” 

“Yes, — water.” 

“ In the mine ? ” 

“And in the stocks. Thirty cents assessments. No divi- 
dends. Somebody ’s comfortable, but it ain’t at the Pyes’ Nest,” 

“ Oh, when did they buy in 

“ When it was fifty dollars a share. When it was running 
up, last summer.” 

“ Now it is — 1” 

“Nought-seventy-five, — asked. Par value ten dollars. And 
they want me to sell ont for what I can get. Oh, thunder ! ’ 


TWENTY QUESTIONS. 389 

and Flip whisked himself half round, and looked out at the 
window. 

“How rauchl” France asked, in a low, pitiful tone. She 
could not stop to feel about it. She must find out all she 
could. 

“ Forty shares apiece. Six thousand dollars.” 

“ But that is n’t so very much.” 

“ Only all the rest is in Grand Tangent, and now there ain’t 
any dividends here.” 

“ Phil ! how are they managing 1 ” 

“ House mortgaged. There, — now you ’ve got the whole of 
it. And I wish I was n’t in it. They don’t understand the first 
thing, except that the money don’t come, and the assessment 
notices do. I have to make up anything 1 can for the minute. 
As soon as I get into the house, they begin. Why did n’t you 
begin before 1 ” 

“ How could I guess ? And what good will it do, now I have 
guessed 1” asked France, mournfully. 

“ I don’t know. Only there ’s one more friend in it.” 

When they got out at the Boston station Flip had just time 
to see her across to a street-car, and run round to his own train. 
As they walked up the platform, France said, — 

“ Philip, I want to beg your pardon.” 

“What for I” asked Phil. 

“For not seeing half the splendid stuff there was in you, 
when I saw you first.” 

“ Miss France, I want to thank you.” 

“What fori” echoed France, not stopping to think of jocose- 
ness. 

“ For seeing some of the trash that was in me, and helping 
me see it.”. 

After France sat down in the car her hand tingled blessedly 
with Phil’s last hearty pressure, and lier face was so bright that 
people opposite looked to see. 

She was thinking of another parting, months before. 

“ There is a little bit of Fellaiden down there before you. I 
wish you would look after Phil Merrivveather in some kind way.” 

Perhaps some time Rael Heybrook would know how she had 


390 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


cared for his wish ; perhaps, through those letters of Phil’s, 
something might have crept round to him already. 

If Flip felt like that, she was glad they had a way of hearing 
from him at Heybrook Farm. 

But now, as she took her transfer ticket and the conductor 
stopped a West End car for her, the brightness faded down a 
little. Turning nearer homeward, she turned back suddenly in 
her thought to her poor old friends. Poor Miss Chat and Bab 
and Mag ! 

Was there anything, however queer, that might be done for 
them ? 

She thought of one thing, and she was just queer enough to 
try it. 


THE PRODIGAL DAUGHTER. 


391 


CHAPTER XXXVIII. 

THE PRODIGAL DAUGHTER. 

Mb. Everidge was in his little smoking-room. It occupied 
an angle between the library and the back drawing-room, in a 
projection which faced that of the conservatory, not counting 
among the main rooms of the house. All these rooms gave free 
access the one with another, or could be shut off at pleasure. 
Mr. Everidge had appropriated this little sanctum with alacrity, 
— so cosy, so withdrawn, and yet so central at will to the life of 
the house. 

It was just after an early Saturday dinner. On this day it 
was the Everidge custom to return to more primitive usage, 
and make place for what the head of the house called “ the old 
settlers’ Saturday night,” which meant tea at eight o’clock and 
a little dish of “ private baked beans ” for himself, which was 
so borrowed from, often, that it had to be more than once re- 
plenished from the kitchen. But on no account would the 
ladies of the family have tolerated a big platterful all at 
once. 

The cook had been particularly successful in a delicious re- 
past of abridged courses suited to the anticipation of a third 
meal. The family had also been alone, and a day without guests 
was a boon to the elders. 

“ Too,” Mr. Everidge had had a good morning down town. 
It had been one of the days when things ran as in oiled grooves, 
each sliding into its order, none crowding or hurrying out of 
place before another. Thpre had not needed to be any switching 
or siding off, any bustles of running up and backing down. He 
had also made some good sales, and shifted profitably some con- 
siderable investments. 

As the sun, setting now more and more toward the north. 


392 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


struck in through a street vista, and sent a yellow beam across 
the small apartment, which seemed, with the light clouds of 
fragrant smoke, to get entangled there and lose it§ way out 
again, making a great deal of itself in a mixed, broken, glitter- 
ing way, Mr. Everidge’s thoughts, vague and comfortable, were 
lit up in like dreamy, shifting manner, touching here and there 
some puff of hopeful plan or inceptive notion or satisfied recol- 
lection, and without need of concentration to immediate pur- 
pose, gently illuminating everything at once that had been, was, 
or was likely to be. 

It was at this moment that France, giving a little supereroga- 
tory tap of ceremony at the half-open door from the library, came 
in upon a certain timid, special, earnest errand. 

Undoubtedly the juncture affects, and effects, much. But 
what accomplishes the juncture! 

Come in, little Fran’,” said her father pleasedly. 

“ Are you sure you won’t send me out again, papa ! ” France 
asked him, coming in and sitting down where that yellow sun- 
beam instantly caught with some of its wandering threads among 
the light edge-fibres of her hair and made another mixed-up 
radiance. 

“ Not until I send the other sunshine out too,” said Mr. 
Everidge. “ You two came in together at opposite sides. Now 
the place is about as full as it can hold, or I care for.” 

“ You ’ll make me cough and choke me out if you begin on 
another cigar,” said France. “ There ’s just enough of that here 
for me. And I ’ve come for a very serious, important talk.” 

France had the clever feminine instinct to begin with a little 
bit of graceful, insignificant tyranny, submitting to which her 
masculine companion would taste the sweetness of a chivalrous 
indulgence, and be more ready to prolong and intensify the ex- 
perience by a graver yielding. 

“ And it is n’t very cheerful, either. I must make haste be- 
fore the sunshine goes.” 

Mr. Everidge dropped the end of his cigar into the tall cuspidor 
beside him, turned further round toward his daughter, then 
settled himself back again in his deep chair and said “ Begin.” 

“ I don’t know but you ’d better have had the cigar, after all 
I ’m a good deal frightened. I may choke, as it is.” 


THE PRODIGAL DAUGHTER. 


393 


Mr. Everidge put his hand in his breast-pocket and drew 
forth a wallet. He was used to France’s whimsical beginnings 
when she wanted money, and aware that beneath them was a 
real, invincible dislike to asking for it. 

“ How much is it, France 1 ” 

“ 0 papa ! It is six thousand dollars ! ” 

Mr. Everidge’s eyebrows went up, and he put back the wallet. 
“You are like the New York dentist who told the gentleman 
coming in to pay a recent bill that it was fifty-six hundred 
dollars. He did n’t carry so much about him.” 

“ You remember, papa, last summer when you told me up at 
Fellaiden about your making all that silver money, and that I 
should say how some of it should be spent 1 ” 

“Yes. Did I promise anything!” He was willing to let 
^ France come round to the explanation of her extraordinary re- 
quest in her own way. 

“ Only that I should have my share, papa. You gave Effie 
twenty thousand dollars the day she was married.” 

“ Yes, in effect. She will have the income of what is worth 
that. It w’as far better than I should have expected, even a 
few months ago, to be able to do. But affairs have gone won- 
derfully well with me all this year. Property begins to stand 
for something ; it is alive again. And I have learned a lesson 
from the depression. I am securing things so as to provide an 
equal portion for each of you in turn, as you leave me ; or when 
I leave you, I hope, a great deal more.” 

“ Dear papa, there is no question of you or me leaving each 
other. We are going to spend money together for ever so long 
yet. So could n’t we take six out of my twenty now, if we 
wanted to very much indeed ! The rest would grow up to 
twenty again before I, — in those dozen years, you know, 
papa.” 

“ Unless you wanted five or six more next week, prodigal 
daughter,” answered Mr. Everidge, much mystified, somewhat 
discomposed, and inclined at any rate to keep up the defensive 
play of the subject as long as he could. 

“ That ’s just what I said !” exclaimed France. “I should 
like, for some things, to be a prodigal daughter. Only I would 


394 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


try to spend it for some sort of — Do you remember how I prO' 
nounced it one Sunday evening in our reading, when I was a 
little girl V’ 

Mr. Everidge laughed. France had rendered it “ righteous 
living.” 

“ Do you think you know now how to spell it any better 1 ” 
he asked. 

“ I could try, I said. Papa, now let me tell you all about it. 
It’s those dear old Miss Pyes, and the Nest is mortgaged. And 
they have got six thousand dollars where they can’t get it back, 
and the rest where — this year — it does n’t pay any divi- 
dends.” 

“ Blessed old ninnies ! ” ejaculated Mr. Everidge. “ But do 
you suppose they would take six thousand dollars from you, or 
me, or anybody 1 These are things we can’t help people in.” 

“ There must be w’ays,” said France, “ if people would take 
the trouble to go round. There ’s poor Mrs. Dr. Jan way, with- 
out any property but that land — and taxes ; and it ’s good land, 
worth ever so much to hold on to, they say, if somebody that 
could afford to would only buy it ! ” 

“ Yes. There would be no end to these things, France.” 

“ I don’t know. T do think it would come out, somewhere,” 
answered the girl, with eager eyes. “ But of course it w^ould n’t 
be for one person to do all the things. All I want to do — I 
mean, of course, I want you to do — only nobody need ever lose 
by it except me, if you would fix it so, is to buy — ” 

France hesitated. 

“ Very well, let us hear the whole. Buy what 1” 

“ A hundred and twenty shares of Hercules mining stock.” 

“ Whe-e-i^; ! ” Mr. Everidge fairly jumped from his chair. 

“0 papa, where is that other cigar 1 Do smoke it, and 
listen, and think ! ” 

Mr. Everidge walked to the wundow. 

“You’re shutting up my sunlight, papa.” 

“ France ! I hope you ’re not going to grow ’israatic 1 ” 

“ No, papa, joWsmatic, if you ’ll only let the sun shine on me.” 
France was as demure as a kitten, and as quick to play with 
anything ; but there was a thrill in her voice nevertheless. 


THE PRODIGAL DAUGHTER. 


395 


“ You see it was all that silver fever, when it began ; and 
people — you, papa, made such sudden money. I think they 
ought to be helped out of it.” 

“Do you know that Hercules stock isn’t worth a half 
penny 1 ” 

“Yes, papa ; but they don’t. And they ’ve been paying 
assessments, and everything will be stopped, and then they will 
know it. Then you couldn't do anything.” 

“ Where did you find out all this 1 ” 

“ I saw they were in trouble, and I asked. Philip Merri- 
weather knew.” 

“ What is the rest of their money in 1 ” 

“ Grand Tangent.” 

“ That ’s good. It will come up again.” 

“Yes, if they only had this six thousand back for the mean- 
while. Papa, don’t you think when things come round to us 
so, we are in them, whether we want to be or not 1 ” 

Mr. Everidge came over beside France again. “ Fran’,’’ 
he said, “ you are a good girl ; but you ’re an odd one. You 
don’t understand the relation of things. You would turn the 
world topsy-turvy.” 

“ I suppose the right things would. But I ’m going away, 
papa, now. I ’ve done my errand. I ’ve told all I know ; and 
as you say, it is n’t much. The things yon know may make my 
odd out even,” and she laughed, and kissed her father, and left 
him, with a certain look of withheld beseeching in her face. 

As she passed through the library door, the little sunbeam 
from the other side, called back from its gentle play, vanished 
quickly across its leagues of earth-surface, drawn down into the 
dip of the horizon after the vanishing sun. 

Mr. Everidge sat in the twilight and thought things over. 

“ She ’s the only woman I know of who understands how to 
take herself off before the word too much,” he said to himself. 

Whatever else he said or remembered — but why should we 
expect to know more about that, just now, than France ? 


396 


ODD, OR EVEN^> 


CHAPTER XXXIX. 

BENEDICITE. 

The Everidges, while in town, went to the Church of the 
Epiphany. 

The music and the preaching were fine, and the congregation 
was imposing. 

France enjoyed the preaching, and parts of the music ; but 
now that she was beginning to seek a little more into the 
centres of things, the congregation, and even the choir, often 
distracted her. She liked better, sometimes, to go with Miss 
Ammah to a quiet little church on a side street, where the seats 
were free, and the Sunday-school children sang the Glorias and 
Canticles. Very often Philip Merriweather came into town and 
went with them. Then, frequently, he and Miss Ammah came 
home with France to the Sunday lunch. These were the arrange- 
ments that fell in the day after France’s talk with her father 
in the smoking-room. 

Helen had gone home from church with the Sampson Kay- 
nards. 

After France had taken off her hat and sacque in her own 
room, she came down and found Miss Tredgold and Phil in the 
library ; the former with her feet on the fender, and herself 
politely only half occupied with a book. 

“ I want to try if I can make out the notes of that lovely 
‘ Works of the Lord ’ they sang to-day,” she said. “ Come over, 
Philip, into the piano-room.” 

They crossed the back ’drawing-room, from which a narrow 
curtained arch led into the L end of the evening-room. The 
piano was opposite in the alcove. 

When France’s pure voice struck the sweet first, third, and 
fifth, as she tried the opening words of the Canticle, and then 


BENEDICITE. 


397 


went up to the octave upon the “Praise Him,” dropping down 
in low, accented notes through fifth and third with “ And mag- 
nify,” to rise again to the clear, strong fifth with the second 
“Him,” and return to the keynote with the “forever,” the 
sounds stole through to Miss Ammah’s ears and feeling in such 
fashion that she rose from her chair, left her book in it, and 
moved round through the hall into the evening-room. She 
thought she would like to hear what France would make of her 
chant. 

“ I don’t know that that is quite right,” she heard her say. 
“ I have n’t a perfect musical memory, or understanding of 
these constructions. But that is the expression of it. Is n’t it 
beautiful 1 ” 

And then came the second verse ; France had brought in a 
Prayer Book with her. 

“ 0 ye Angels of the Lord ! bless ye the Lord ; 

Praise Him, and magnify Him forever,” 

“ I ’m rather glad I have n’t heard these things all my life ; 
I suppose I should have got too used to them.” 

“ It ’s queer,” said Phil ; “ all the over and over of it, like 
the ‘ mercy endureth forever.’ It seems to me so ridiculously 
that it does, when they read that psalm.” 

“ 0 Phil, — but see how this begins and goes through ! See 
the grandeur of it ! ‘ All ye Works,’ — first the Angels and the 

Heavens, then the ‘Waters above the Firmament’; then ‘All 
ye Powers,’ — ‘0 ye Sun and Moon, and the Stars of Heaven; 
O ye Showers and Dew ; Ye Winds of God ; 0 ye Fire and 
Heat ; Ye Winter and Summer, ye Dews and Frosts, ye Ice 
and Snow ’ ; then the things the Powers make, — ‘ 0 ye Nights 
and Days, — 0 ye Light and Darkness, — 0 ye Lightning and 
Clouds ’ ; and then it drops down to the very earth. ‘ 0 let 
the Earth bless the Lord ! ’ Then the high things on the earth : 
‘ 0 ye Mountains and Hills,’ then the ‘ Green Things upon the 
Earth,’ and then down into the earth. ‘ 0 ye Wells, 0 ye Seas 
and Floods ’ ; and then the living things, ‘ 0 ye Whales and all 
that move in the Waters, — ye Fowls of the Air, — ye Beasts 
and Cattle.’ And at last the ‘ Children of Men,’ and amongst 


398 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


them the ‘ Israel ’ and the ‘ Priests of the Lord,’ — chosen out 
of Israel ; and then see what is put last, as if that were the 
way, after all, round to the Heavens and the Angels again. ‘ 0 
ye Servants of the Lord, — ye Spirits and Souls of the Right- 
eous, — 0 ye holy and humble Men of Heart ! ’ I think that 
is the great ‘ round and round ’ Miss Ammah talks about. And 
I think it is grand,” she ended, with her words slower and 
lower, “ to be anywhere in it.” 

Then she struck the piano again, and sung the last three 
sentences : — 

“ 0 ye servants of the Lord, bless ye the Lord ; 

Praise Him, and magnify Him forever. 

0 ye Spirits and Souls of the righteous, bless ye the Lord ; 

Praise Him, and magnify Him forever. 

0 ye holy and humble Men of Heart, bless ye the Lord ; 

Praise Him, and magnify Him forever.” 

Her voice and enunciation dwelt with a wonderful, tender 
emphasis, italicizing that final apostrophe. France had for- 
gotten all about herself ; she had been lifted up. It was the 
grandeur of it, as she had said. 

When she had been in the middle of her rapid rehearsal, 
there had come another auditor into the evening-room, — Mr. 
Everidge, looking through the apartments to find Miss Ammah. 
He wanted to have a little talk with her. 

Miss Ammah had hushed him, noiselessly, with her hand 
upon his arm. “ Don’t break in on those children ! ” she 
whispered. And Mr. Everidge seated himself on the low sofa 
beside his old friend. 

So he heard that sweet, fervent rendering ; fresh, animated 
with a young, true appreciation ; uttered freely, — just as freely 
as if it had been spoken of some inspiring secular song, the song 
of a nation, perhaps. And why not 1 Was it not the song of 
the Nation of nations'? 

But he had not found out so much about his little Fran’ 
before, as in these last two days. 

“Do you think,” said Phil Merriweather, “they mean all 
they sing and say, — all of them, — such a lot of it ? That ’s 
what bothers me.” 


BENEDICITE. 


399 


“ It ’s all there to he meant,” returned France’s clear voice. 
“ And I ’tn glad it ’s somewhere. Do you think they mean all 
they sing and say in any church, all of them 1 ” 

“No. And that’s why I hate it, — or did, — almost. I 
know they don’t mean it. And I can’t. So what should we 
keep saying it fori It isn’t honest.” 

“ What don’t you mean, Philip 1 ” 

“ Well, for one thing,” — and here there was a faint rustling 
of the leaves of the book, — “ this. I don’t want to be ‘ among 
the saints,’ set up ‘ in glory everlasting.’ I ’d rather be among 
common men, down here, doing something.” 

“ ‘ Holy and humble men of heart,’ ” quoted France, half 
interrogatively. 

“ Don’t know about the first part. ‘ Men pf heart ’ is pretty 
near the thing.” 

“ What if that is the glory 1 ” 

“Whatl” 

“ Doing something Helping along, Making out the right- 
eousness, making things right. Having a good, strong heart.” 

“ If that’s it, I ’ve no objection to go in for it.” 

“ If that is it, I think you are in for it.” 

“ But, glory ! a great shine. Who wants to sit and shine 1 ” 

“ I don’t see but you ’ve got back to the ‘ humble,’ then.” 

“ Look in your Webster for that,” came Miss Ammah’s voice 
from the evening-room. 

“ Are you there. Miss Ammah 1 Come and help us, then.” 

Mr. Everidge’s hand was laid now on Miss Ammah’s arm. 
“ No,” she answered. “ Help yourselves. I ’m resting.” 

France really went and fetched the big dictionary from the 
library. 

“ There ! ” she said. “ ‘ Humble,’ from ‘ humilis,’ — on the 
earth, the ground. That’s where you want to be, — at the 
beginning of things. Now see what ‘holy’ says. Here it is : 

‘ sound, safe, whole.’ Don’t you like that 1 Is n’t that what 
we all like things to come round to 1 ” 

“ Dictionary-Bible is pretty good,” said Phil. “ But Bible- 
brogue ! ” 

“ Let ’s find ‘ glory.’ — ‘ Clarus, — bright, clear.’ What ’a 


400 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


the matter with that? See here, Philip. I’ve just thought. 
Wasn’t all the glory in the New Testament just making things 
clear and right and bright? Wasn’t the wine made at the 
wedding ‘ manifesting forth the glory ’ ? And was n’t it the 
righteous — the people that cared for the right and did it — 
that were to shine as the sun ? ” 

France Everidge was “ not religious,” and she could n’t bear 
what Philip named as “ Bible-brogue.” She steered carefully 
around it. But neither could she bear, when she came face to 
face with it, that a boy like Phil should be growing so good 
and “ splendid ” and pretending, or imagining himself, to be 
scouting the very 6es<ness. Besides all which, she had an 
intense love for the thorough searching through things. 

She slipped the big dictionary off her lap upon an ottoman, 
and turned to the piano again. 

“ I wish I had the exact notes of that chant,” she said ; and 
then her fingers softly touched the chords, and she sang, — 

“ 0 ye Children of Men, bless ye the Lord ; 

Praise Him, and magnify Him forever. 

0 ye holy and humble Men of Heart, bless ye the Lord ; 

Praise Him, and magnify Him forever ! ” 

Mr. Everidge rose quietly, and walked away out of the even- 
ing-room. Miss Ammah went round through the small draw- 
ing-room, in more deliberate evidence, and joined him in the 
library, where they had their little talk. Brief enough, for 
the lunch-bell interrupted ; but nevertheless a good deal to the 
point. Although, indeed, in the course of it, Mr. Everidge did 
suddenly and irrelevantly propound to Miss Ammah this ques- 
tion : 

“ I wonder how all this great friendship strikes you, Ammah, 
between that girl and boy ? ” 

“ George Everidge ! he ’s seventeen and she ’s twenty. There 
are whole lifetimes between them ! and if not, I know better ! ” 

And Fi’ance’s father said, “So she is — twenty. Only, I’ve 
always thought of her as such a child, you know ! ” 

The next afternoon, Mr. Everidge drove out to his “ place,” 
and made also a quiet, friendly call upon the Miss Pyes. 


QUIT CLAIM. 


401 


CHAPTER XL. 

QUIT CLAIM. 

“ I HAVE been consulted,” said Mr. Everidge, who had care- 
fully chosen the leading words in his little speech beforehand, 
and had to make the slightest possible catches and pauses now 
and then, to be quite sure that he fitted in the right one, “ in 
regard to — certain — investments — which I was told you 
wanted — advice — upon ; and I thought as I was out of town 
to-day, I might as well ride round and give my — opinion — in 
person.” 

“ You are so kind, I am sure ! ” cried Miss Mag, who received 
him. “ But then Chat and Bab and I always say so ! ” 

There are more difficulties in the way of some men for doing 
a silly thing, than in that of most for doing a shrewd one. It 
is against all their antecedents, against the propulsion of the 
whole order of their affairs. It is like a few drops of a flowing 
stream trying suddenly to run up-current. If it were achieved, 
even, it would be a hazardous thing. It might originate a 
small, fresh maelstrom, into which new interests might be mis- 
led to their engulfing. 

Mr. Everidge had no intention of appearing as the purchaser 
of Hercules shares. He not only would not let his left hand 
know what his right hand, forgetting its cunning, was about to 
do, but he could not even do it in a regular, right-handed way. 
His only facility lay in the utter, business-innocent simplicity 
of the three old ladies. 

Chat and Bab came into the room, and Mag reiterated to 
them how kind Mr. Everidge was, and how she had been telling 
him that they always said so. Miss Mag was one of those per- 
sons who make their words do service as they do their gowns, 
wlien they have once put them together; or rather, perhaps, 

26 


402 


OBn. OR EVEN? 


who for fear of self-repetition or plagiarism, are continually 
quoting themselves and giving themselves credit. “ As I said 
the other day,” — “ As I was remarking to So and So,” — became, 
in her formula, “ I told them so, Chat and Bab,” or “ We said 
so, all of us, Chat and Bab and I.” And in such a little da capo 
as this, it had to be again, “ I told him. Chat and Bab, and we 
do, don’t Vie 1 ” 

“ Thanks,” returned Mr. Everidge, with final, inclusive grati 
tude. “ And now, what is the point, if you please 1 To buy 
or to sell 1 ” 

“ He heard,” Mag further reviewed to her sisters, “ that we 
wanted to — do something, — to get advice, — about our stocks. 
And I — ” Mag was absolutely in danger of going round that 
ring of their united opinions of their friend again, if he had not 
averted it by interposing at the word. 

“ Oh, stocks ! something already invested, then ? You must 
excuse my interrupting you, but I have n’t very much time.” 
And he half drew his watch, and glanced at it. 

Miss Chat took the lead then, with her most direct and busi- 
ness-like manner. 

“ It ’s those Hercules mines, sir. Good property, I suppose ; 
for we paid fifty dollars a share for it. But it ’s expensive hold- 
ing it, and we wo\ild like to change it if we could. Only we 
think we ought to get a fair price for it, and there does n’t seem 
to be any demand for it.” Miss Chat’s speech sounded very 
well to herself, and she did not doubt Mr. Everidge was im- 
pressed by it. Which I do not doubt, either. 

“Yes,” he answered meditatively, as if it were appraisal of a 
tangible commodity, to be discounted a little, merely, at the 
second hand or for temporary depreciation. “ It is n’t worth 
quite so much as it was. And they ’re assessing, I believe.” 

“ 0 dear, yes,” said Miss Mag, “ and that ’s just what we 
can’t see through. Chat and Bab and I. When a thing ’s once 
bought and paid for, what must you keep buying it over again 
for ? ” 

“Occasionally,” said Mr. Everidge, “we buy an elephant. 
And the elephant has to be fed.” 

“ 0, I wish we knew a man who wanted to get up a menage- 
rie ! M’'e all wish so, — don’t we. Chat and Bab ? ” 


QUIT CLAIM. 


403 


“ Of course I suppose we must expect to lose something^ — 
selling at a poor time,” said Miss Chat, resuming the capable 
head of affairs. “ But it is n’t reasonable that we should give it 
away ! ” 

The returns of internal amusement were coming in upon Mr. 
Everidge so fast that he almost felt as if he were getting the 
interest of his possible purchase beforehand. 

“ Women are at a great disadvantage in the money market,” 
he observed gravely. “ No one can operate successfully who is 
not on the spot. Would you be willing to put the matter into 
my hands % or, in fact, I might just take it from you, by private 
transfer, at once and here, and manage it for myself at my 
leisure. I should n’t care to appear as a stockholder, just yet. 
It might affect matters elsewhere. Suppose I purchase of you, 
and while these assessments go on I simply hand over the 
amounts notified to you, to be paid in on your own account % ” 

“ Why, that would be being a perfect Angel Gabriel, Mr. 
Everidge ! But then we always did say, — Chat and Bab 
and I, — ” 

“ I should n’t wish you to lose by it, eventually, Mr. Ever- 
idge,” said sensible, considerate Miss Chat. “ Of course, I sup- 
pose your knowledge and opportunities, — the truth is, we never 
ought to have meddled with it.” 

“ Yes, that is the truth,” assented Mr. Everidge cordially, 
and relieved to put his foot on some solid fact by which to 
advance to his purpose. “ And pardon me — there are always 
conditions in a business transaction — if I make two provisos to 
our agreement. The first is, that it shall remain absolutely 
unmentioned, even between ourselves at any time, that such 
a transfer has been made. I have business reasons for that. 
Never mind what I may happen to do with it, or how or where 
it may turn out well or ill. You will ask me no questions, and 
you will acquaint no one with the matter. And the second 
condition, — that you shall positively promise me you will never, 
on any inducement, buy into fluctuating fancy stocks again.” 

“ My gracious ! I should think not ! ” exclaimed Miss Bab. 
“ When it has nearly turned us all into paper pulp, this time ! 
1 feel as if I had been churned through a mill. Fluctuating 


404 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


“ But I must sa}’’ again, now, before we promise, that I don’t 
wish you to take a great risk of a loss to yourself, eventually, 
in doing this,” repeated Miss Chat. 

“I feel pretty certain I shan’t lose anything,” said Mr. 
Everidge. “ And I will tell you this much ; that I am not 
acting by my own impulse merely in looking up this Hercules 
stock, but by wish and advice of another pretty strong party 
concerned. If I say too much, you will think you had better 
hold on to it yourselves,” he added, laughing, “ but I do assure 
you, according to the very best of my business judgment, I do 
not think you ladies could by any possibility ever make any- 
thing out of it.” 

Of course he knew he was talking great nonsense, but where 
was the use of anything else 1 These women to be going into 
stock speculations ! 

His nonsense was to them profound knowledge, upon which 
they cast themselves as upon a tide that came in on purpose 
to float them from the rocks, while simply acting for itself 
in its own regular way. Upon the deep sea of vague, intricate 
financial possibilities behind it, they thankfully threw the dan- 
gerous load that had nearly fixed them high and dry, easily 
crediting that it would of itself drift somewhere to somebody, 
though they could float with it no longer. 

And then they asked him about the Grand Tangent. 

“ That ’s good,” he said, “ though it may run a trifle lower 
before it goes up. I can easily sell for you in that if you like. 
But there would be greater sacrifice of future probable returns 
than in this,” giving a very curious pause and accent before and 
with the last word. He held in his hand now the little bundle 
of certificates which Miss Chat had produced for him from her 
lovely antique escritoire. 

“ Now shall I pay you in cash, or will you let me advise a 
different investment 1 ” 

“ I ’m afraid we must have some cash,” replied Miss Chat. 
“ We have been cramped lately, and we shall have immediate 
occasion for about two thousand dollai's.” 

Which was the amount secured within three weeks by mort- 
gage on the Pyes’ Nest. 


QUIT CLAIM. 


405 


Mr. Everidge drew a blank check from his wallet and made 
it out at the pretty escritoire. The very pendent brasses from 
its many handles seemed to glitter with a sudden smile to the 
eyes of Miss Chat and Bab and Mag as he did so. 

All around the room the little bronzes *and the bright tiles 
and the rainbow china, and even the soft gray herons on the 
dado, seemed to be glittering and winking and lightening up 
with congratulations to each other, as if to say, “ We are all at 
home again ! The Pyes’ Nest is all right and settled again, 
and there ’s a satisfaction amongst us ! ” 

For the poor Miss Pyes had been doing all their little 
household niceties of work lately with such dull limpness 
under that often-escaping, melancholy-feeble protest, “ Only 
there ’s no sort of satisfaction in it now ! ” 

“ Will you let me advise for the remainder, and in case 
you sell out a part also from the Grand Tangent, the New Eng- 
land Mortgage Security Company’s bonds for a permanent in- 
vestment 1 And if you like, and send me word or say so, I 
will attend to it at once.” 

“ Oh, we do say so, all of us, — don’t we, Chat and Bab 1 
We always say, now, there ’s nothing like good, permanent 
securities.” And Miss Mag looked half elated with her achieve- 
ment of speech, and half apologetically at Miss Chat as having 
trespassed on her territories. 

But Mr. Everidge had scarcely said his courteous farewells 
and mounted his horse again at the garden gate when the three 
sisters turned to each other in the little hallway with the con- 
founding question, “ What can we possibly say about it all to 
Phil 1 ” 

Greatly to Mr. Merriweather’s amusement presently, who 
knew of course from France that she had “told papa,” and 
that there was another friend in it, and who had also caught a 
flying glimpse of Mr. Everidge himself on the Avenue Road, 
direct from the Corner Village, as the five o’clock out passed the 
crossing at Vernon Square, they solved their difficulty by not 
asserting any flxlsehood, but by ingeniously skipping a truth. 

When Phil came in, the fire in the library was newly laid up, 
and a perfectly artistic pile of little logs was blazing. The 


406 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


brazen tips of the folding-fender were scintillating with its re- 
flection, the little circular concave mirrors had redoubled, distant, 
dancing lights in them ; the dark, polished woods of the furni- 
ture palpitated with bright flickers upon every protuberant 
round ; the gay autumn leaves in vases and lovely clusters 
against the walls were glorified ; it seemed as if the herons had 
set their humpy shoulders a hair’s breadth further back in pure, 
sudden pride, and moulted their gray plumes to feather them- 
selves with moonlight. The oval supper-table was set under 
the softly shaded lamp, where it was only put for special little 
festivals, and the glass and silver on it made more twinkling, 
radiating points. 

Beside all which, Miss Bab’s eyes twinkled, and Miss Chat’s 
nose, that was always sensitive at the end under strong emotion, 
and Miss Mag’s tongue. 

“We thought we ’d be all ready for you with a good, solid 
supper and good news, for we all knew you ’d be so glad to get 
it. Chat and Bab and I, — did n’t we, girls 1 It ’s so extraor- 
dinary ; it’s like a play, or the Children of Israel in the Bed 
Sea ! Did n’t I say so. Chat and Bab 1 And did n’t I always 
say there ’d be a way through 1 And it ’s come, and it ’s just 
straightened itself out of its own accord, with the waters stand- 
ing up on the right hand and on the left, and we ’re as good as 
over, dryshod. Though it ’s no sort of use for you to ask us 
how, for we don’t understand a bit about it ourselves, either 
of us. Chat and Bab, do wel Although Chat did go into 
that broker’s day before yesterday, you know, and came out 
with that poor head. But we’ve heard from the business 
to-day, and it ’s all off our shoulders like Pilgrim’s bundle, and 
you need n’t take any more trouble about it, and there certainly 
is a Providence in things ; and there ’s Reuie coming in this 
minute with the broiled chicken and the jollyboys, and I 
have n’t given you a chance to go and wash your hands 1 ” 

How they had got it all up — the bright fire and the supper- 
table, and the broiled chicken and the jollyboys, and the lucid 
incoherence of Miss Mag’s explanation — in the half-hour or so 
since Mr. Everidge’s departure was a bird’s-nest mystery. 

But there it all was, and Phil Merriweather took it as it was 
presented. 


QUIT CLAIM. 


407 


By a circumlocution of “ your business man ” instead of any 
mention of “ that broker,” he generously saved their consciences 
in such further speech as was necessary for a rational conclusion 
of the subject by a general account. Meanwhile the ladies left 
the broiled chicken pretty much to his own separate discussion, 
not guessing in the least what an inconsiderable reward of merit 
it was. 

Mr. Everidge called France into his smoking-room that night. 

He put into her hand a long envelope with several folded 
papers in it. “There, Fran’,” he said, “it belongs to you. 
It ’s the evidence of as absurd a business transaction as I was 
ever guilty of in my life. But I think you and that preacher 
about the midst of things, up there outside of it all, may give 
me quit-claim now on the stock-operating account. I don’t 
believe there are three more such innocent old geese in the most 
remote circle of any influence of mine ! ” 

He glanced rather inquisitorially at France when he touched 
her with that phrase about the preacher, but France was abso- 
lutely preoccupied with himself, and there was nothing in all 
her glowing face but her tender, exulting joy and pride in him. 

But after she had thanked and kissed him, and said how 
lovely it would always be that the Pyes’ Nest had not gone to 
pieces, and how they must be chattering and babbling and mag- 
nifying there to-night, it was surely some strange thing that 
made France go away so quietly into her own room, and when 
she had put by the papere in the deepest drawer of her davenport 
lean her head down upon the lid of it, with her cheek resting on 
its crimson cover, and say, as if she were creeping to some 
sweet, forlorn refuge, “ The dear old gentlemen, the dear old 
* fathers, are the best and the surest, after aUl ” 


•408 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


CHAPTER XLI. 

NUMBER NINE. 

There is a delightful little puzzle in everybody’s hands just 
now, and I don’t wonder they have called it the “ Gem.” 

The fifteen little numbered blocks, put into their small case 
in a mix, with only one vacant space to move to, are to be 
shifted back and forth, each to its single present opportunity, 
till they all come into regular count and order. 

Not by pushing any particular one, you find as you work at 
it, directly and forcibly to its own place ; but only by bringing 
each, wherever it may start from, into the next best possible 
situation for helping the general train of movement, oi making 
way for another to pass on into a hopeful sequence. 

The less you seem to hurry Number One, the more prosper- 
ously it comes round toward its top corner, and the more beau- 
tifully Two and Three and the rest file about, and slip to their 
comfortable stations, each where no other was ever meant or 
may be allowed to be. 

There is a point in this generous little game when things 
seem smoothly hastening on the best and most obvious princi- 
ples to a solution. 

There is a point in the mingled affairs of sane and right- 
minded people, when they appear to have got into such a line of 
march that there remains slight intricacy to straighten, and the 
story-puzzle seems coming to such a simple end that it hardly 
need to have been made an undertaking of at all. 

Look a minute at where the people we most care for are, in 
the purposes and action of this small chronicle. 

Up in Fellaiden, Rael Hey brook is working for Lyman and 
the old folks, for the minister and all the public weal ; Sarell 
Bassett is working for Rael and the other Heybrooks ; Bernard 


NUMBER NINE. 


409 


Kingsworth is planning for Lyman, that so, against his very 
self, he may also help the truth between France Everidge and 
Israel. 

France, down here, reaching her kind hand to Phil Merri- 
weather, the only one she knows much how to help, and with 
him stretching both hands toward a larger help for the pleas- 
ant old Miss Pyes, has done the “ dear old father,” the brisk 
prosperous, handsome gentleman not yet turned the comer into 
his fifties, such more interior service, that the man of stocks 
and exchanges, who is so proud of his name on a company bond 
and in the market, doing a perfectly ridiculous and unbusiness- 
like thing, to take a burden off three old women’s shoulders 
that they never ought to have taken on, is learning a new 
schedule of values not quoted at any board, and realizing a per- 
centage that returns only from a sunken fund. 

Miss Ammah Tredgold, with some kink of reserve till France 
Everidge comes to her own mind, “ stands and waits,” with the 
best readiness, when her way opens, but not a minute before, to 
do anything for anybody. 

According to the analogy of the puzzle, such circulation 
should be bringing them speedily round to serene self-arrange- 
ment. And yet, with only three or four months, and a few 
outward changes between this time and those fair, free days 
among the hills, when it would have seemed that they so held 
the blessedest facts and possibilities of life in their own hands 
that they might hold them back a while without disaster, 
Rael Heybrook was saying, out of a dark, hard compulsion, — 
“ It is going by ; I have been a fool ” ; and France was aching 
way wardly with the very tenderness of her insistence that “ the 
dear fathers were the best, after all ! ” 

There are a few last moves, when all looks as if it should 
come clear, which are the whole crisis, for missing or achieve- 
ment of the problem. There are more lives that come within 
a hair’s breadth of happiness than were ever lost, in any grand, 
inevitable devastations. 

Just now, the days, the very hours, came freighted with hap- 
penings that seemed not momentous in themselves, but which 
bore upon a secret experience the more searching that it only 
half acknowledged itself. 


410 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


Helen Everidge had come home on Sunday night to tell her 
father and mother that the Kaynards were going to Washing- 
ton for a month, and wanted her to go with them. They were 
to leave on Wednesday. This was decided in accordance ; and 
though it took her sister from her, it can hardly be said that it 
was this, in any great measure, that put that little pathos into 
France’s feeling. 

On the Monday afternoon, France had walked round to the 
Berkeley, and found Miss Ammah’s trunk in the middle of her 
sitting-room. The good lady had had a letter from New York, 
from the husband of an old friend, begging her to volunteer a 
visit : his wife was suffering from nervous malady which threat- 
ened serious persistence ; and some change and cheerful com- 
panionship must be contrived for her, while exciting and 
fatiguing society was put out of the question. 

This was a blow. Miss Ammah had not been very satisfac- 
tory of late, to be sure. Whatever she might have heard from 
Fellaiden, and whatever purposes she might be maturing in her 
own mind for the soon-coming spring and her new home arrange- 
ments there, she said very little to France about any of those 
matters; and France^ was singularly unwilling to question. 
Miss Ammah, indeed, bringing up her prudence or her jealousy 
for the absolute right of things, as a late reserve, was really 
blocking the way, like the contrary Number Nine in the puzzle. 
She left France to come to herself in the most hardhearted and 
immovable manner. If Rael Heybrook wrote to her, as no 
dpubt he did, she made no specific mention of his letters. Yet 
she had to say something when France told her Flip’s news, 
and tried, with rather patent subtlety, to elicit some comparison 
of it with what Miss Ammah received from more authentic 
sources; and France was sure that she regularly heard from 
Mr. Kingsworth, and that if any great thing happened, she 
would tell her of it; and withal, she was Miss Ammah, the 
woman of Great Pyramid inches, whose mere neighborhood was 
an upholding in the most honest and uncompromising resolu- 
tion of things, and who would understand her better than any- 
body else, if there had been anything to understand, or if there 
were ever to happen to be anything. 


NUMBER NINE. 


411 


For Miss Ammah to go off now to New York, to a fresh, 
strange interest, and nobody knew what new plans, was as 
the pilot departing in the midst of the unknown shallows and 
channels. 

Yet it was not that, either, altogether or even chiefly, which 
made France lay her head down as if she laid some hope down 
with it, and nestle her heart to that pathetic filial comfort. 

Flip Merri weather, who knew how to catch pickerel, was to 
Miss Amraah’s immovable Number Nine as some other last 
little block that keeps up a perpetual dance between those that 
might else quietly settle to their relations. He knew that 
France was always eager to hear “ about all the hill-people,” 
and without the slightest discrimination, or question of the 
need of it, brought her all Hannah Louisa’s miscellaneous 
gossip. 

And Sunday night it had been this : — 

“ We have got three ministers up here, now. Mr. Kings- 
worth and Rael Heybrook, and Leonora. They have picked up 
the whole parish amongst them, and they just do make things 
spin. Not prayer meetings, and that sort entirely ; Rael, you 
know, is n’t even converted ; but they ’re fixing as if they 
thought the kingdom was coming, and there ought to be some 
kind of a decent place for it to come in. Leonora has spunked 
up the Sewing Society, and we’ve earnt new carpets for the 
aisles and pew strips; and they were all put down by a Female 
Bee last Friday. And Sunday afternoon there was a surprise. 
Mr. Kingsworth began with a Sunday-school sing at two 
o’clock on purpose to give folks a chance to get through look- 
ing and wondering, and to calm down. You see the big west 
window, where the sun used to lay in afternoons in summer 
time before they had the blinds, and take the women’s bonnets 
fairly off their heads with headaches, and put the men to sleep 
and snoring, and that lets in all the coldest little crack-draughts 
in the winter, had been tacked over with a big gray cloth and 
the new blinds kept shut. It was nice and warm, and meeting 
was out early before dark, and nobody mistrusted anything. 
Well, if those three had n’t been at it these weeks back, untack- 
ing and tacking up again till it was all finished, and there, with 


412 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


the sunshine just streaming straight on it and through the 
colors, was the handsomest picture window you ever heard of ! 
Eael had cut out the regular pieces, the squares and circles and 
triangles and clover-shapes, and Leonora Kingsworth had done 
the real drawing work and the shading off with paints. It was 
some new contrivance, — a kind of prepared silk that gums 
right on to the glass, and is thin and fixed to let the light 
through, and it ’s just like real colored glass. The red and the 
blue and the yellow and green were all in set figures, corners 
to the panes and crossbars and Grecian pattern and the other 
things, so that the old window-lights never would know they 
were there. And up over the top they had got a new big half- 
circle of glass all in one piece, and that was done in beautiful 
soft blue and gold color and white, for the sky and the clouds 
and the glory, and in the middle a white dove flying down, just 
as lovely and natural ! You know that window comes in in the 
square between the side pews where ever so long ago one of the 
old stoves used to stand, before they had the big one down at 
the back under the gallery. Well, Mr. Kingsworth has put a 
little white marble table under the window and a white marble 
vase on it, and that ’s where the baptizing is going to be. I 
believe half the children in the meeting-house were cackling up 
when folks came out and had time to talk it over. ‘ Ma ! say 1 
was 7 ever baptized 1 say, ma 1 ’ 

“ I forgot to name that they have put up weather strips, and 
puttied and painted over, till the sashes are all solid and tight, 
and there ’s no wind crevices. 

“ There ’s one thing. The whole town says it will be a match 
finally between Leonora Kingsworth and Rael Heybrook. It 
does beat all, certain, how those Hey brooks get along.” 

“ I wonder she did n’t wind up with, ‘ Why don’t you get 
along like those Heybrooks 1 ’ That used to be the song,” said 
Phil. “ But I keep her pretty well filled up with what I do 
come across, and I dare say she crows now at the Heybrooks. 
That would just be Hannah Louisa. She never lets anybody 
take down her brother Flip but herself.” 

True enough. All Phil’s smart sayings and seeings and do- 
ings were faithfully retailed, and Fellaiden was full of his uncon- 


NUMBER NINE. 


413 


scious glory. “ He ’s forever at the Everidges,” Mrs. Fargood 
reported. “France makes everything of him, though of course 
he ’s only a boy.” 

Rael’s lip went up when he heard her say that. Yet it had 
its curious effect, put by and pondered in his mind. Not jeal- 
ousy of a boy of seventeen in any shape, not even as to the 
friendliness which France was permitting to become so estab- 
lished and intimate. It lessened in nothing, it came into no 
sort of rivalry with, the friendship she had given him. But it 
proved one thing, — her readiness to be a friend. What differ- 
ence was there, — Flip Merriweather, Lyman, himself 1 

There was nothing for him ever to presume upon. She was 
his friend, as the Kingsworths were his friends. So and no 
more. But she belonged and would belong elsewhere ; and one 
of ‘these days he should not even be hearing about her, and his 
world would have a great blank in it that no beautiful thing 
would grow in. 

It had seemed when Miss Ammah bought that Gilley house, 
having France Everidge here with her in the middle of her 
plans, that there would always be a link, always opportunities. 
Anything might grow or come to pass, and he could wait reso- 
lutely for whatever it should be. 

But how many summers Miss Ammah had been here before 
she ever thought of bringing France ! Next year, perhaps, it 
•would be some strange girl. She probably knew dozens of 
them. 

Strangely silent, too, she was in her letters. Did she under- 
stand, and know that it would never be of any use ? 

He could not easily say anything very directly of France him- 
self, in his occasional writing, even if he had not felt himself 
tacitly put in check. She was too present in all his thoughts 
for mention of her to come readily by name in any sentence. 

He had not thought of such a thing as asking France if he 
might write to herself. That asking stands for so much with 
the plain-hearted, primitive New England youth. 

Miss Ammah thought she was so carefully doing nothing. 
That is a great mistake in many cases. To do nothing may be to 
do the sti’ongest thing possible, especially when you stop short 


414 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


after doing, however involuntarily and unintentionally, some- 
thing. The locomotive stops short, met by some obstacle : the 
train it was drawing smoothly along cannot stop, rushes head- 
long, is telescoped, demolished. 

And when it is a question of human hearts, the brake nice 
and powerful enough to adapt its checks and ensure safety there 
has yet to be invented. 

France tortured herself with that girl at Fellaiden. She tried 
very hard not to hate her. 

All this lovely winter time, in the glory of the snows, in the 
close-drawing of home and friendship that the cold and the iso- 
lation so bind and intensify, in all this beautiful work that the 
young farmer could not do in his busy summers, — oh, this girl 
was having a great deal the best of it ! 

She knew now very well that she wanted at least this much 
more of Rael Heybrook’s friendship than she had got, — that 
it should not be possible for any other woman to have more 
of it! 

Those were hard weeks that went by, — those next ones, four 
or five. 

Things went on just as usual around her. There were lunches, 
and aesthetic little “evenings,” — concerts and oratorios, — a 
society-play running at the Museum, and then Shakspeare at 
the Boston. And her mother was busy about the table she was 
to have at the regularly recurring Old South Fair. France had to 
help her and to accept invitations and make calls and see to the 
children’s dresses for the “ Chicken Germans,” and coach them 
with their serious German, and their literature lessons for their 
classes at school, and be pleased when her father brought home 
tickets, and wanted Fran’ to go to the theatres with him. 

She wondered if all this was doing any good in the world. 

On Sundays she went to the Epiphany, and heard words 
spoken as if out of heaven from the pulpit, and the rustle of 
silks and satins in the pews as the congregation knelt or rose j 
and then, when the same soft rustle and the luxurious, warm 
fur-odors swept down slowly out of the aisles, low snatches of 
talk that floated back with words of the world upon the very 
air that was full of but just silenced Glorias and Eleisons. 


NUMBER NINE. 415 

She wondered then if either, or which of them, meant any- 
thing at all. 

There is not anything to record, separately, of these weeks ; 
and yet the times when there is nothing to record are often 
fullest, — fullest even when it seems to be of the mere ache 
of emptiness. 

The next thing was Miss Ammah’s coming back in the latter 
days of February. 

She reappeared at the Berkeley, glad to see France when she 
came in to welcome her, but constrained, almost stiffly quiet at 
moments, extremely brief altogether in her manner, — the fact 
being that she was a painfully puzzled woman. 

The puzzle had been growing upon her. She had not known 
where she was exactly, or where any of these others were. And 
yet she had felt — and by Bernard Kingsworth’s letter had found 
herself to be — “ between.” She did not like it so much, in 
fact, — such fact as this ; ordinary things were easy and well 
enough, — as she had done in theory. She had got there quite 
accidentally. Now she must either stay, accepting her position 
and acting in it, or break away, letting things crash, and leave 
the pieces to pick themselves up. 

What should she do about it all next summer ? 

And yet so long as next summer stretched itself in the com- 
fortable future, and certain circumstances of it seemed to wait 
her own disposal, when she should have made up her mind, she 
had a vague confidence that she should feel her way, or that 
somebody else would decide something, or that anyhow the new 
season would hold some key in it to the complications of the 
old. She had not dreamed of next summer being taken al- 
together out of their hands. And now the Hetheringhams 
wanted her to make up her mind to go to Switzerland with 
them. Mountain life, absolute change, the grape cure, goats’ 
milk, chaises-h-porteur, what not, — these, with a calm, strong 
companion, — and she would hear of none else than Miss Tred- 
gold, — were to be salvation for the invalid. 

Miss Ammah hardly believed in it, yet it seemed the waiting 
spot for her to move in. How could she leave them always 
to the reproachful doubt that she might have been the avert- 


416 ODD, OR EVEN? 

ing of their dread, should it ever confirm itself as their 
calamity 1 

When she told France Everidge, the girl’s face turned per- 
fectly white. 

Then Miss Ammah knew how far her kindly mischief had 
reached. She smote inwardly upon her breast; she said, 
“ Lord, help me ! but what am I to do about it 1 ” For she did 
not even know yet which way the mischief lay. 

Girls were strange. Something of that Fellaiden experience 
had stayed with France, had had its growth in her, had been 
shaping, changing, declaring her. 

Was it Bernard Kingsworth’s influence, after all 1 And if 
so, was Bernard Kingsworth cheating himself, holding back 
now in his turn for Rael Heybrook ? 

How could she dai’e move hand or foot in such a midst as 
this 1 

France Everidge must move herself. That was what she 
had been saying all along. 

But now here was the poor child precluded from any oppor- 
tunity for moving, even if that question as to her own. Miss 
Ammah ’s, further acting in her present conscious knowledge of 
what she had already done, could have been decided freely. 
There would have been but one way for that. It must have 
been done with openness toward those who had nearer interest 
and authority. And what was there clearly to make known to 
them ? And of what use was it to think about it now at all 1 

Number Nine, with the best will in the world, w'as in a hard, 
wrong corner. 

For France, she was simply down from her “ high -place.” 

She knew now that she had not been strong enough to grasp 
the highest, when she had been lifted close beside it; that' she 
had let go, with a half hold, with a poor, timid, half mind, 
neither world-weaned nor world-satisfied ; and she lay bruised 
and hurt, and only would not moan. 

All that is a figure. France was not down literally, but up 
upon her feet, lifting herself taller perhaps than usual, with 
that pale, proud face. 

She had to take Miss Ammah’s news as if it could be 


NUMBER NINE. 417 

nothing very much to her, as if she had hoped, expected 
nothing. 

She had to walk away home, to take home for granted, and to 
find out how she was to live through the rest of these remain- 
ing weeks in town, through the gay weeks after Easter, when 
Helen would be back, and the pomp and vanities flare up again 
with brief, final flashes, — how she should live through the 
summer, with nothing of that last, beautiful summer in it, 
and through all her life, when that beautiful time, whose gift 
she had put lightly by, should have drifted further and fur- 
ther into a scarce realized past. She could feel already how it 
would seem as if it had never been, and yet as if it had left 
nothing that evermore could be. 

None the less, France was a proud, strong girl. There was 
too great a pow’er of a despair in her for her to give up to this. 
She was too capable of a terrible wretchedness. It is the weak 
who give up, for whom there is no danger that they shall suffer 
hugely. 

Putting up her hands, as it were, in a figure again, for some 
blind seizing of a help, what strange thing thrust itself strangely 
as into her grasp ^ 

Some words she had not thought of since she had laughed 
carelessly when they were first uttered, — words that were ab- 
surdly variant from all her present mood. They came up, in 
her mind, as little, wild, green things, sown by the winds long 
ago, start up out of the ground after a storm. How do we know 
what sends words back to us with no apparent recall 1 

“The ’s them more beans in the world,” Sarell had said. 

She must do something. 

She walked fast. She was walking too fast. She should be 
home before she had had time to think. She turned down a par- 
allel street to that on which they were living. She would go all 
the way down to Beacon Street and back again. 

“ Somebody ’s to get some help,” she said to herself ; “or I 
shall die. And I won’t, — I should be ashamed to die ! There 
must just be that much more help in the world, somewhere ! ” 

Was her brain playing delirious tricks, with random words, 
around the central, actual fact of her endurance 1 or had she 

27 


418 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


grasped out wildly, to find in her hold the blessed truth that 
grew there for her at the precipice-foot, the Christ-bearer’s herb, 
with the brave, sweet heart of healing in it 1 

Was it inconceivable that it should come to her so instantly 1 

Instants are long; and again, nothing is instant, nothing 
comes that has not been prepared for. 

Besides, it was not the worst that had befallen yet ; nothing 
yet had happened at Fellaiden. There was only a broad blank 
before her, and between her and it, instead of a fair, full sum- 
mer-time. She only knew now, as Miss Ammah did, all at once 
that it was over, — what a lurking hope there had been in the 
summer-time. 

She was in the same world with her friend ; the same grand 
measures of things were set in the midst of it. And lives may 
answer to lives as faces answer to faces in the water. 

Something royal began to grow up swiftly in herself, in the 
low, waste place where her gladness might have been. 

But where this can issue, there must be royalty of nature. 
Below the heights a something wonderfully rich and generous 
and warm, not a mere stagnant, dank, and noxious swamp. 

All nature is meant to be so, and recognizes it by an instinct 
of the higher that remains ; else why does the very feebleness 
of the feeble send forth its wailing in the selfsame cry, “ What 
shall I (fo?” 

It was a heavenly quarter toward which France was seeking 
refuge ; only a noble nature would have been moved that way. 
And yet, there was a possible failure in it; France, like so 
many others, was falling into the sole mistake of saying, “ There 
must be help somewhere, for somebody, or I shall die !” 


THE FREE-WILL CHANCE. 


419 


CHAPTER XLII. 

THE FREE-WILL CHANCE. 

“ She 's jest as if she was a watchin’ a custard pudd’n,” said 
Sarell to her spouse. “ Ef you take it oflf the fire a minute too 
soon, it won’t set ; an’ ef you leave it half a minute too long, 
it ’ll cruddle.” 

“ What ’ll cruddle 1 ” asked Hollis obtusely. 

“Nothing. I don’t mean it shell. Not to spile f’r other 
folks. But, Hollis, you know the eave cluzzit that runs along 
our room an’ the sett’n-room attic ? I want a board took down 
where it ’s petitioned off between.” 

“ What fur 1 ” Hollis inquired, as hopeful of full elucidation 
as usual. 

“So’s’t a mouse might fuller a, cat round,” replied his wife. 
“ The’ ain’t but one other way of gitt’n int’ that sett’n-room 
attic. An’ somebody might want t’ be there, athout goin’ 
sekewichis.” 

“ I donno ’s a woman c’n do anything that ain^t sekewichis,” 
returned Mr. Bassett. “ How is th’ ol’ man, d’ y’ think, Sarell?” 

“ I think ef he hed n’t got a line out, fast t’ that mile post ’f 
ninety-nine an’ a foot, an’ warn’t hangin’ onto it, he ’d drop,” 
said SarelJ. “ But it ’s wonderful how folks can hold on till 
they git there, wherever ’t is. I should n’t be surprised ef he 
dumb onto his feet agin, nor I should n’t be a mite surprised 
ef he did n’t.” 

The trying time of year had come ; the first days of spring 
were maintaining their regular contest of right of way with the 
persistent northern winter ; it was like life disputing, inch by 
inch, with death in a creation that has the sentence of death in 
itself, and for which each return to joy and vigor is like a hard- 


420 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


won reprieve. Human life sympathizes in the struggle ; year 
by year, the old, the feeble, the inadequate, yield and go down. 
The earth that opens to receive the seed of the new harvest 
opens for the seed of the resurrection in dark, deep graves. 

Mother Pemble had said, “ See how ’t ’ll be, come spring.” 
Bernard Kingsworth had preached, “ Beware of your wish, your 
brooding thought, your secret waiting, for what may happen.” 
It was happening, seemingly, according to Mother Pemble’s evil 
prayer. 

Deacon Newell had had “a spell” again. It came, on sud- 
denly ; he had been “ taken right down,” as the women said ; 
and Sarell had had her hands full, nursing him. It all came 
upon her. 

Perhaps the homely household simile she had used had oc- 
curred to her in respect to her own nice judgments, as much as 
in illustration of Mother Pemble’s evident keen restlessness. 
There were things Sarell had fully on her mind to say to Deacon 
Amb; but she had no wish to precipitate them upon him, 
when the agitation might turn the scale of life or death, neither 
would she put it off till certain restoration should have hard- 
ened his heart. If the scale were just turned, either way, then 
she would speak. And into her calculations came the element 
first introduced among her motives by that same preaching of 
the doctrine of “ the midst.” She would fain help the poor old 
deacon’s soul out of the mire, if it would be helped, as well as 
rescue Rael’s dollars. 

Something else softened and made her more tender, sitting 
and watching there the fallen, worn old face, with the lines of a 
lonely selfishness channelled so deep in it. 

“ ’Most eighty years ago,” she whispered to herself in her own 
heart, '‘his mother sat and watched him. The’ wasn’t one o’ 
them looks in him then, an’ it would ’a broke her heart ef she ’d 
had a dream of ’em. Where do all the dear little babies go 
to wheu the men and women turn out, hard an’ cheatin’ an’ 
mean, into the world 1 ” 

So one day when he seemed to be growing more comfortable, 
and had taken his beef tea with a better relish, and said to 
Sarell, with a kind of smile as if he had overreached somebody, 


THE FREE-WILL CHANCE, 


421 


“ I hain’t gin up this time, hev I, Mis’ Bassett 1 ” Sarell an- 
swered him, quite softly and pitifully, “ No, deacon, you ain’t, 
and that ’s why I want to say somethin’ to you. Ain’t the’ 
anything you ’d feel better t’ do, suppos’n 1 ” 

“ Supposin’ ! Don’t I tell you I ain’t agoin’ to 1 My father, 
he lived to be — ” 

“ I guess ef we all lived t’ be Methus’lums,” Sarell interrupted, 
but with deliberate speech, “ the’ might be someth’n we couldn’t 
go back of t’ set right that we ’d be glad to in the hunderd an’ 
sixty-ninth year, an’ that it would n’t be any credit to us with 
the everlast’n’ account ef we did, then, Deac’n Newell ! ” 

“ What ye deac’nin’ me s’ close fur 1 What d’ ye think I ’ve 
got t’ set right — ugh ! ugh ! — ’xcept this cough 1 ” 

“ We ’ve all got someth’n, I said, an’ the time to do it is when 
we ain’t frightened, but jest think it ought t’ be done. Ef we 
hed time t’ set it right the last thing, it might do f ’r other 
folks, when we could n’t look out f ’r ourselves any longer, but 
it would n’t help ^ts. You ’re gitt’n well now, deac’n. The’s 
one more chance f’r you t’do a ri’ down hard, han’some thing 
o’ clear freewdll, an’ the chances ain’t long nor strong between 
here an’ ninety-nine. Ev’ry day is takin’ one more bite out o’ 
the apple afore you give it up. Don’t offer the bare core to the 
Lord, He won’t take it.” 

The deacon looked at Sarell, startled, angrily ; his lip twitched ; 
he could not find at once a safe word to answer her with. 

But looking at her he saw tears in her eyes. Something 
motherly in her face, this young, fresh woman’s, and he an old, 
old man, nobody’s care but his own except in the helplessness 
that mere humanity cares for, stirred in him some long-forgotten 
sense — not thought — of somebody waiting tenderly to see 
whether he would be a good child again or not. 

He had never seen Sarell like that before. 

“ You ain’t expear’nced religion,” he said half defiantly, half 
wonderingly, “ What do you talk about the Lord fur 1 ” 

“ P’raps because the Lord hes ways t’ talk t’ all of us, ef it 
ain’t expeeriunce,” said Sarell with a strange, sweet dignity, 
“ Ef I hed a boy o’ my owm,” she went on, something like 
Mary’s Magnificat lighting her face with a hope too pure and 


422 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


brave to be shy of that old man lying there to be saved, “ I ’d 
pray that ef he lived t’ be eighty he might never do a mean 
thing ] or ef he did, not realizin’, that he ’d repent of his own 
accord, so ’s t’ be grander ’n ef he hed n’t hed to. I was kinder 
thinkin’ ’bout yozir mother, Deac’n Amb ! ” 

The old man answered not a word. Sarell straightened the 
bedclothes, turned the fresh sheet smoothly under his chin, and 
went away. 

“ She did n’t know what had possessed her,” she told Hollis, 
“ or finally what she had said.” “ It did n’t half seem as ef 
’t was myself,” she declared. And then she put her capable, 
strong hands on Hollis’s shoulders, and laid her bright, dom- 
ineering head against his breast an instant, with a tender little 
sob. 

“ Sho ! sho ! ” said Hollis, with pleased, indulgent soothing, 
stroking her hair. “ It ’s all right, little girl ! It alwers is 
all right when you take hold, you know. I ’ll resk it.” 

Deacon Amb lay awake that night and thought a good deal 
about his mother. 

She had died when he was yet a small boy, so that his re- 
membrances of her were few. But they stood forth in vivid 
points on the far background of that first childhood of his that 
was shut up and sealed at ten years old, when his stepmother, 
“ a real calc’latin’, drivin’ woman,” came to take possession of 
things, himself included as a thing that could run errands, and 
pick up chips, and turn the churn if “an eye was had on him,” 
from first daylight till the work was done on churning days. 
The second Mrs. Newell was in every respect an helpmeet to 
her husband, from whom Amb inherited that side of his char- 
acter which was henceforth most carefully nurtured and de- 
veloped. 

But Uncle Arab remembered to-night the different teachings 
of a pale, soft-speaking w'oman, whose eyes looked upon him 
again out of that morning haze now that he turned toward 
them with his tardy recollection. They had not looked upon 
him so for many a hard, sordid year, in which he had had his 
back upon that old time. Had they been waiting, — waiting 
all the while with that sad patience 1 


THE FREE-WILL CHANCE. 


423 


He remembered a day when he had come home from school 
with another boy’s knife that he had picked up in the play- 
ground. He had been kept in, and so had found it after all the 
rest were gone. His father never gave him knives. 

He went straight to bis mother to show it to her. He re- 
membered just how he had opened and shut it, and made her 
look at the four blades. It was “ a prime knife ” be told her. 
And then he remembered, — why did all this come up in such 
a keen re-living now? — just how her voice had sounded; it 
sounded now through the intervening silences and confusions as 
the eyes looked out of the dimness, saying, “Ambrose, you 
should n’t look too long at a thing that is n’t youm.” 

He knew just how he had argued, — little shortsighted fool, 
supposing she could not see any further than he showed her, — 
that there had n’t been anybody there, and be did n’t know — 
certain true — whose it was, and it was his now he had found 
it, and school did n’t keep till Monday anyway, and he could 
have it till then. 

“ Ambrose ! ” she had said to him again, “ don’t keep a thing 
overnight, if you can help it, that you know ain’t yourn.” 

Overnight. Should he have his mother’s eye to meet in the 
morning if he did keep anything overnight, the long night that 
might drop unawares? 

He had n’t meant to keep anything overnight. He had only 
meant — as he had pleaded for the knife — to keep it a little 
while, to play with it just a little, then he would go and find 
the other boy and give it back. 

“ Ambrose ! ” he heard the soft voice say, with the tender 
eyes still looking down at him, “ it 's growing dark already. It 
will be overnight if you don’t go right off now.” 

In the dozing half-sleep after that, into which he fell and lay 
till morning, those words kept on sounding over and over to him 
in that strange, sweet way : “ Don’t keep it overnight. It will 
be overnight, Ambrose, if you don’t go right off now.” 

Until, when the early stir in the house and some quick tone 
of Sarell’s broke up, without his quite knowing what had done 
it, his imperfect slumber, and then it seemed to him in the in- 
stant of his waking, that he was roused by that other sentence. 


424 ODD, OR EVEN? 

sharply spoken, “ The’s one more chance, Deac’n Amb, t’ do it 
of clear freewill ! ” 

Sarell came in and gave him some beef tea. Then she fixed 
up his pillows and smoothed everything comfortably, and left 
him so again, and as if all ministration were withdrawn save 
such as cared in its turn for the weak old body, lest by its losing 
needful rest might be lost the one more chance, there came a 
peaceful hush upon him, and he slipped off into a calm morning 
nap with neither dreams nor voices. He woke when the sun 
was shining across into the bedroom from the south sitting- 
room window in the jog. 

He felt a good deal better, — yes, he thought he could get 
up to-day. 

“No more ’n y’ did yist’day. Only inf th’ elber-chair,” Sarell 
commanded, “ but I ’ll fix a swing-board f ’r y’r feet, an’ then 
y’ c’n be wropped up an’ rolled where y’ c’n see out the winder ; 
or over int’ the keep’n-room finally, ef y’ like. But y’ don’t tetch 
y’r feet to the carpet, no-way. The’s draughts along the floors, 
alwers.” 

“ I want f git f my papers,” said the deacon. 

“ Don’no,” said Sarell, looking at him a little anxiously. 
Something, she was not sure what, had changed the old man. 
Face and tone were different ; not sicker or weaker, perhaps, 
but different. They were as if something new — or old — had 
been called up in him, or rather as if he were called away to it. 
He forgot his furtiveness, his keenness, that had always marked 
his manner in all allusion or approach to his affairs or his 
“ dockyments.” He said so simply to her, as if she had known 
all about them and him, “ I want f git f my papers.” 

“ I don’no,” she repeated. 

Then he lifted his eyes at her impatiently. “ Don’no, — don’- 
no 1” he echoed. “What’s all that furl Ain’t I a gitt’n 
better 1 ” 

“ Yes,” said Sarell stoutly. “ But the’s two of ’em, all the 
same.” 

“ Two what 1 ” 

“ Don’noes. I don’no ’s you oughter ; an’ I don’no ’s I oughter 
take my own jedgment about it — either way.” 


THE FREE-WILL CHANCE. 


425 


“You took yer own jedgment p’utty spry, yist’day.” 

“ I ’m the same mind to-day. But I ’ve got both sides o’ you 
to think on, too.” And Sarell beat a retreat, with an empty 
pitcher she had picked up, into the kitchen. 

“ He thinks so,” she said to herself, in a noiseless way of 
speech she had with lips and breath, as she stood there consid- 
ering, the pitcher still between her hands. “An’ whatever he 
does, it ’ll stand accordin’. An’ I ain’t told no lie, either. He 
is better ; but better ain’t well. It ’s high time he did it, ef 
that ’s what he means ; an’ that lays between him ’n the Lord, 
— I can’t regg’late it. But t’ let him overdo, — delib’rit, — how 
sh’d I ever be sure he might rCt ’a ben gitt’n well 1 ” 

Sarell was not exactly a prayerful woman ; but there was a 
sense of something that might enlighten and direct, as she 
ejaculated in the same noiseless fashion, with a knot in her eye- 
brows and giving a downward jerk to the tight-clasped pitcher, 
“ I hope I ain’t got this fur t’ lose my way in th’ dark at the 
very wind-up ! ” 

She went back, pitcher and all. 

“ See here, Sarell,” said the old man, “ I b’lieve in gou. 
Here ’s my keys. Go to my seckerterry — ” 

“ No, I can’t ! ” broke in Sarell, with emphasis. “ I would n’t 
tetch them keys f’r a farm. I ’d sooner fetch the seckerterry t’ 
you ! ” 

“I’ve got somethin’ t’ do, — an’ you ’ve got t’ help me,” said 
the deacon slowly. “ I can’t git in there myself. I can’t git 
up. I ’ve tried. An’ it can’t wait — overnight, — overnight, — 
because — you see — I’m gitt’n well, I’m mendin’; you said 
so ; an’ I ’ve got to do it — on the mendin' hand” 

The poor old man’s breath was short ; he had been drawing 
on his stockings, and trying to get out of bed by himself. 
Sarell set down the pitcher hastily, and came to him. 

“You’ve jest got t’ keep still awhile,” she said, “an’ when 
you ’re rested, an’ hev hed y’r brandy ’n water, an’ some more 
beef tea, you shall try bein’ got up int’ th’ elber-chair ; an’ ef 
that works we ’ll jest roll y ’ m t’ the seckerterry. It ’s good ’n 
warm all the way ; an’ I don’t persurae ’t ’ll hurt ye. But 
don’t you go t’ strainin’.” When Sarell pronounced “you” with 
three letters it was equivalent to quiet italics. 


426 


' ODD, OR EVEN ? 


The deacon’s face lighted up, and a gleam of its old malice 
played across it. 

“ Mother Pemble ’ll be dreadful tickled t’ see me, won’t she, 
Mis’ Bassett 1” 

After the brandy and water and the beef tea, the deacon 
“ guessed he could walk, after all.” Sarell knew better. 

Mother Pemble’s latch was up and the door ajar. She had it 
left so a good deal in these days that there was “ sickness in the 
house.” When she wanted it shut she could “ speak.” When 
Mother Pemble “ spoke,” it was “ like pursin’ a hole with an 
eyelot-pin,” Sarell said ; and she made haste to shut her up, in 
double sense. 

No doubt she was “ dreadful tickled ” to see Deacon Amb 
come rolling in on casters. 

“ Here I be. Mother Pemble,” he said, in a voice whose weak- 
ness cracked with glee, “a ridin’ in with my coch ’n span. S’pose 
y’ thought I ’d be ridin’ off, b’ this time, ’n th’ narrer one-hoss 
team 1 Ain’t agoin’ t’ be tucked up ’n green bedclo’es jest yit. 
Mother Pern ! ” 

If it was pleasure at his so far recovery that lit Mother Pem- 
ble’s eyes, a cloud of anxiety swiftly rose up in her face, cover- 
ing that expression, which might in its turn refer to the limit 
of it. But Sarell Bassett had no belief that it did. 

The anxious look followed the little cortege across the room, 
and when the big chair was wheeled close up in front of the old 
secretary Mother Pemble’s head was lifted forward from her 
pillow, and Sarell told Hollis afterward that “ef the’ was ever 
jump enough in a woman’s eyes t’ fetch her whole body after it, 
the’ was in the ol’ woman’s then. An’ when th’ whole jump 
hes t’ be hep' t’ the eyes, I sh’d think,” she said, “ ’twould be 
wuss ’n the noorologer. She ’s got more indoorunce t’ the end 
th’n would ’a saved her soul, ’n half a dozen more o’ th’ same 
bigness, long ago ! ” 

“ AVould old Amb take ’n carry off them papers, ’t the last 
minute, before her eyes'?” was Mother Pemble’s inward alarmed 
misgiving. She had never counted, in all the calculation and 
price-paying of those years, on such a simple thing as that. 


THE FREE-WILL CHANCE. 


427 


Well, he wouldn’t do it; sick, dying, he couldn’t: that had 
been all her supposition, which had hardly needed to state itself. 

He had his bunch of keys in his hand. “ That one,” he told 
Sarell ; and Sarell took it and put it in the keyhole. He turned 
it himself; then he rolled back the fluted doors, after which he 
lay back in his chair, tired, to take his breath. 

Sarell sent a glance from under sidewise lashes across the 
footboard of the bedstead as she stood, and saw Mother Pemble 
independent of her pillows by at least two inches’ space, her 
lips apart, — two devils, fear and expectancy, fighting in her 
eyes. 

“ That creetur knows as well as he dooes ev’ry individooil 
thing the’ is here,” was SarelTs mental comment, as she stood, 
moveless, waiting orders. 

“ That middle drawer,” said the deacon feebly, pointing. 

Sarell opened it. 

“ Gi’ me them papers,” said the old man. 

Sarell took them out, and put them into his hand ; then the 
shallow drawer was empty. 

“Shet it up; that ’ll do,” said Deacon Amb. “Now — look 
in the — deep right-hand pigeon-hole — under the led, — it 
slides, — an’ gi’ me — ” 

There was a just perceptible movement in the bed behind. 
Mother Pemble was straight up when Sarell drifted a second 
look over upon her ; and the two devils in her eyes were flash- 
ing naked swords. 

“I was go’n t’ say — my long luther wallet,” said the old 
man, in a dreamy, broken way. “ But never mind, — I’m 
kinder sleepy ; — guess it ’s the brandy. Shet it up — come 
agin to-morrer.” His head dropped back upon the cushioned 
chair-top ; his lips dropped in upon his toothless jaws ; his jaw 
dropped down a little. The poor old man was very pale. 

They rolled him out again, — the three folded papers lying 
under his half-relaxed fingers. 

In Mother Pemble’s eyes, as they followed him forth across 
her room, — she had noiselessly settled herself back into her 
place again, — there were two devils dancing now, expectancy 
and triumph. 


428 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


“ What beautiful nusses we air ! ” she sneered. She had to 
say something, upon the long breath of her relief. 

Sarell interpreted the long breath ; the words upon it fell to 
ground without her heeding. She put the papers and the keys 
under the old man’s pillow, and would not have him left alone 
again. 

That afternoon there was a fresh flicker of the candle. The 
deacon called Sarell, made her bring pen and ink, and feebly, 
himself, drew forth the documents. 

“ I’m goin’ t’ do it o’ freewill,” he said. “ I ’m gitt’n better, 
—ain’t 1 1 ” 

“You’re gitt’n better ev’ry minute, deac’n,” answered Sarell 
bravely; for she was telling the soul-truth, — giving him that 
last chance. Standing in the midst, there, she was glad. 

“Yes. The three days o’ grace ain’t run out. ’T ain’t per- 
tested. Filler me up, Sarell.” 

But Sarell called Hollis. She would not have him go “ off 
the home-piece,” to-day. Hollis sat up on the bed behind the 
pillows, and held his stout shoulders back to back against the 
deacon’s. Care’line was in the keeping-room, gently rocking in 
lier chair. “ When the ’s anything f’r me t’ do, le’ me know,” 
was her standing order to Sarell. What the deacon signed — 
or sighed — away, meantime, was matter of ignorant apathy to 
her. 

The deacon selected and turned over, with trembling fingers, 
the mortgage-deed. He took the pen in his hand, moved it 
slowly along in air above the three lines he had written upon it 
before, passed it in like manner over the signature, and then 
drew a wavering but deliberate line beneath his name. “ Now, 
you two must witness,” he said. “ But — fust — you take the 
pen, Sarell, an’ write — on them other two — what I tell ye.” 

Sarell took the pen, the two other folded papers which the 
deacon feebly put toward her, and the atlas that she had laid 
for him on which to write. 

“ For value received — '' 

“ ’Ceived,” said Sarell, writing. 

“ I hereby make over and transfer — ” 

Sarell’s pen scratched laboriously-. “ Fer,” she said, in about 
a minute, 


THE FREE-WILL CHANCE. 


429 


“ The herein certificates — ” 

“ Kits,” pronounced Sarell in a minute more ; but she had 
been to school and to spelling-bees, and, it being a five-syllable 
word and of importance, she had orthographized correctly ; al- 
though, as we have had opportunity for observing, she used the 
alphabet with a somewhat free hand for ordinary convenience. 

“ To Israel Welcome Heybrook.” 

That name went down as if it had been written some time of 
a habit. 

“ Now put the same — same way on t’ othei’,” and he watched 
her while she did it, kneeling down beside his bed, and leaning 
the old atlas against it. 

“ Now read it all over, both on ’em.” 

Sarell read the words twice. 

“ Gi’ me the pen.” 

She held the book for him, and placed the papers success 
sively. He signed his name to each indorsement. 

“Now take this,” the mortgage deed, “an’ put ‘Witnessed* 
under what I ’ve wrote, t’ the left hand. I ’m a sight better^ 
Sarell, ’n I was this raornin’ ! ” 

“You’re an everlastin’ sight better. Deacon. You ’re most a 
real well man.” And Sarell looked at him with that yearning, 
motherly look, as if she had saved, not a man so much as a 
child, out of some long, strange danger. 

“ But I don’t care,” he said. “ I don’t take nothin’ back. 
The ’s more ’t I c’n hev whole comfort in now, ’f I git — when 
I git — well. An’ when I don’t — There, put y’r two names 
down there, you ’n Hollis, ’n then — ” The deacon stopped. 

“You ’re doin’ too much, Deac’n Amb,” put in Hollis, streak- 
ing away something across his cheeks with the biggest knuckle 
of his right hand, as he let the old man gently down with his 
pillows, and came round to take the pen from his wife. “ You 
jest keep quiet, ’n we ’ll ’tend t’ ev’rything, Sarell ’n I.” 

And Sarell shone up at the honest fellow through two bright 
blue pools of water and sunshine, as she gave him up her 
place, and went to bring the deacon’s flaxseed lemonade. 

After that, the deacon lay awhile quite still, with his hand 
over the three folded papers which Sarell had placed together 


480 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


on the counterpane before him. Then he said, — Hollis had 
withdrawn, — “ Tell Mr. Bassett t’ hitch up, ’n drive over t’ 
Hawksb’ry, an’ see Squire Putt’nham, an’ git him to go right 
into Deane an’ see this recorded. ‘ Recorded,' tell him. Squire 
Putt’nham ’ll know ; ’n then to-morrow git word t’ Welcome 
’n Isril, ’n say ’t I want t’ see ’em. I sha’ n’t git round there 
myself, ’n these east winds, f’r a spell, mebbe. An’ I kinder 
want t’ see it thriew.” 

Sarell went and shut the bedroom door. “ Deac’n,” she said 
softly and quietly, as she returned, “ I don't want t’ wear y’ out, 
but y’ said someth’n ’bout ^ more' Hadn’t y’ better le’ me 
make some kind o’ memmirander ’v whatever else the’ is 1 ” 

“ What fur 1 ” the deacon demanded, with some strength of 
sharpness, “ when I ’m a gitt’n well 1 ” 

“ Folks git well faster when th’ ain’t nothing t’ go askew ’f 
they did n’t,” said Sarell. 

The deacon made no haste to answer. “Well,” said he at 
last, prolonging upon the word the suspense during which per- 
haps the suggestion was setting itself in rather a persuasive 
light to him, in view of his not being able at present to handle 
over the leather wallet. “ Well, put it down, ’f ye want to. 
’T won’t take long.” 

Sarell got a piece of paper, and dipped the pen. 

“ Four ’nited States five hunder’ dollar five p’ cents.” 

“‘Cents,’” quoted Sarell, not dropping her inflection. 
“ Whatl” 

“ Bon’s, course, ’nited States Bon’s.” 

“ Bon’s,” repeated Sarell with solid emphasis, notwithstand- 
ing the dropped “ d ’’ on the good solid word. 

“Four State o’ New Hampshire five hunder’ dollar six p’ 
cents.” 

“Cents, bon’s,” reiterated the scribe. 

“An’ two thous’n dollar” — he lowered his voice — “Hub 
an’ Tire Railroad bon’s, seb’n p’ cent. All good f’r cash ’r 
inves'ments, ary one. Got things snugged up jest in time. 
Don’t feel much like speck’latin’, ’r hevin’ t’ haul in neither, 
'mejutly.” 

The deacon actually chuckled. The inventory of his posses- 


THE FREE-WILL CHANCE. 


431 


sions sounded good to him, was relishing upon his lips. The 
old proverb of the ruling passion has its foundation in the law 
of life. Strength comes, when it will come for nothing else, for 
what a human being has always been strongest toward. 

“ Now, Mis’ Bassett,” he said, as she silently folded up the 
paper and looked round for a place to put it in, “ You know 
more ’n my wife, or Mother Pemble either. Hold your tongue.” 

Sarell held her tongue, as surest sign she could continue to 
do it. She came, still in silence, to the head of the bed, lifted 
the comer of the feather tick, and with a big pin from her side 
fastened the memorandum to the under mattress. 

“ What ’s that 1 ” asked the deacon. 

“ What I ’ve got noth’n t’ say about,” she answered. “ It ’s 
there, ’long o’ your keys. Now I ’ll go tell Hollis. The arrant, 
I mean.” And she hastened off to find her husband in the 
barn. As she went, she remarked to herself in the free air, 
with a return of her natural spirit and quaintness, “Ef I didn’t, 
— more ’n Care’line, — I would kerwumpuss 3 but Mis’ Pemble, 
what she don’ know ain’t there.” 


482 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


CHAPTER XLIII. 

MOTHER PEMBLE’S ULTIMATUM. 

“ He won’t come agin to-morrer, — n’r nex’ day,” said Mother 
Pemble to herself. 

She kept quiet all that afternoon. She put her latch down, 
and went to sleep. Mother Pemble took good care of herself, 
and there were hours in the twenty-four that were available to 
her, when she had so redeemed them beforehand. 

“The’ wa’nt nothin’ in that middle drawer but the mor- 
gidge ’n them share stiffikits. Them ’s nothin’ t’ me. The 
rest ’s all in the ol’ luther wallet ; an’ praise be t’ natur, Amb 
hankers back t’ the cash, alwers, — sure ’s death. I knew he ’d 
claw it in agin, give him time. But, land ! ef he hed n't hed 
time ! I do dispise speck’latin’ — tell it ’s thriew with sat’s- 
fact’ry. — Thriew with! Yes, I guess Amb’s thriew with it 
now — poor ol’ soul! Ef he hed n’t ben Ambrose Newell, I 
should n’t ’a ben — ” 

Yes, she would ; and she knew it. She would have been 
Harriet Pemble, all the same ; there might only have been an 
easier way for her to be. It was the nearest — that unfinished 
sentence in her mind — by which she came to any touch of 
pity or self-excusing, as she thought these things all over, lying 
in the twilight, waiting for her supper, with the doors open 
through to where Ambrose lay, waiting, — for to-morrow. 

Between four and five o’clock, while Hollis was gone to 
Hawksbury, he had had a “ weak spell ” again. He was better 
now ; but they had only been able to give him the brandy and 
the strong beef tea at intervals ; he could not take any ordinary 
form of nourishment. Supper-time came, and went by ; the tray 
was carried into Mother’s Pemble’s room, and brought out again ,* 


MOTHER PEMBLE's ULTIMATUM. 433 

the dishes were washed up in the kitchen. Hollis Bassett was 
to sit up by the deacon to-night. 

Sarell lay down upon the keeping-room lounge. It was im- 
possible for her to sleep. She had done a great part of what 
she had come here to do, but there was no triumph in it. She 
began to be pitiful and sorry in her heart, instead of hard and 
relentless, toward such wretched meanness and wrong; not 
bearing to feel that it was human nature, — the nature that 
is born, every day, into mothers’ arms, into the world. Con- 
fronted with it, she would find herself as quick and keen to 
detect, as prompt to scathe and give battle against, as ever; 
but it troubled her now that it should be there for her to con- 
front. The time had gone by when she had thought with 
exultation of out-manceuvring Mother Pemble, and “ facing her 
down” with some clever couj> of discovery. Now she had come 
to it, this did not look beautiful to her. She had found some- 
thing more beautiful, — to discover the last good, instead of 
the last evil, in a fellow-creature, and to lay hold of that. 

“ I would n’t ’a thought,” she said to herself, “ I ’d ever ’a 
felt ’s ef I c’d set by Deac’n Amb ; but ’pears t’ me I actially 
could. Ef that little mite o’ decency in him ’d only grow up. 
It ’s like the baby ’v him, th’t wa’n’t never fairly raised. But 
the’ won’t be time now, — ’n this world. Th’ ol’ man ’v him ’s 
got t’ die an’ be buried ; ’n ef the’ is any beginning agin, -he ’ll 
hev t’ start awf’l weak. Them things is turr’ble strange, — 
how d’ we know? — We start awf’l weak here, th’ best ’v us; 
what ef we don’t reck’lect what we ’ve starved ’n kep’ down 
somewers else ? What ’f this world ’s a kind ’v ’n ondecided 
hell, ’n we ’ve made th’ ev’l sperrits of us, — th’ oT men ’n th’ 
ol’ women, — where we was tried afore ? What sh’d we be put 
here t' he saved fur, ’f we ain’t got something further back t’ be 
saved from? — An’ wouldn’t it be awful, ef while we was a 
dealin’ with the dev’ls ’v one another, we sh’d be a chokin’ out 
the feeble little sefferin’ angils ? ” 

The tall clock in the corner stirred with the coming of the 
hour. In three minutes it would strike. Sarell could not 
remember whether it had struck ten or eleven, last. She had 
been too busy to think about the time ; and the room had been 
dark when she lay down here half an hour ago. 


434 ODD, OR EVEN? 

The three minutes went ticking by, so slowly. The watched 
minutes are longer than the unreckoned hours. When the first 
stroke of the hammer fell, it came as something that had been 
waited for until given up. Sarell sat upright. Then she 
counted — two, — three, — and on — to twelve. 

Care’line was asleep in the little parlor-bedroom, to which a 
door led from diagonally opposite the deacon’s, the latter being 
at the back corner, at right angles to the entrance to the kitch- 
en. Opposite the kitchen door was an east window where 
the keeping-room projected from the front building; between 
this window and the deacon’s door the loflnge stood. Beyond 
the east window was the passage to Mother Pemble’s room, 
running past the great front chimney, against which the press- 
closet was divided off from it. Between the front chimney and 
the parlor-bedroom was the space occupied by the stairway 
from Mother Pemble’s room into the little attic. Exactly 
across the keeping-room from this, again, started the other 
ascent, that turned around the kitchen chimney, and went up 
to Sarell’s chamber. 

This geography is needful. 

Sarell could hear Hollis gently snoring in his chair. She had 
known he would go to sleep; therefore, though she let him 
have his way, supposing he was saving her night’s rest, she 
had quietly remained here when he thought she had gone away 
up stairs. 

The midnight stillness spread again where the deep, ringing 
sounds had broken it, as a water-surface heals and levels. 
Hollis’s snoring ceased. The wdiirr and striking of the clock 
had penetrated his slumber, and then the very fall of silence 
had roused him up. He moved in his chair, and stretched his 
arms. Sarell knew he would keep awake a while now. 

She had just leaned softly back upon the big down cushion, 
thinking that she ought to try and get a nap herself, when a 
slight, distinct sound startled her, — a dull, metallic clash, like 
the dropping of a bunch of keys. It wEs directly overhead, 
upon the floor of that little keeping-room attic. There was no 
access to the attic but through Mother Pemble’s room, or 
through the eave-closet by means of the detached partition 
boards. 


MOTHER PEMBLE’s ULTIMATUM. 


435 


Mother Pemble’s door was fast, and the cord was drawn 
across the corner of the passage without, to the door-knob of 
the press behind her chimney. Whatever might be done with- 
in, Sarell had always made sure of late that there was no 
emerging ; and infuriated as the old lady might be, the fact of 
her imprisonment was something of which she could admit 
no consciousness. 

Sarell had not as yet availed herself of the secret passage she 
had arranged ; she had not supposed that Mother Pemble 
really mounted, herself, to the attic ; she had only been pretty 
certain that she crept about, when the way was clear, in the 
lower rooms, and even — as indicated by Doctor Fargood’s story 

— out beyond the doors. She had stopped for the present this 
possibility of prowling, or of any conveying away ; for she was 
convinced that the object of this long waiting and working was 
nothing short of seizing or making a chance, at the right mo- 
ment, for “executing in her own wrong,” upon Deacon Newell’s 
negotiable property. Also that she had found access, in some 
way, to the place where it was deposited. Mother Pemble and 
the “ old seckerterry ” had been locked up too long together, 
not to be kept locked now. 

But Sarell had been feeling that things could not always 
be so shut up and under control. Spring was approaching; 
weather when doors could not all be fastened at night, or 
porches disused and locked, and the keys kept back without in- 
quiry. A little further on than spring, she knew of a time when 
her vigilance must needs be suspended. The thought of differ- 
ent, sweet watch was making her hate this ; and yet this must 
not be abandoned, for right and friendship’s sake. She had felt 
that she must soon manage to bring matters to a crisis, — to 
leave some liberty that would be taken advantage of, and then, 
by her own private command of the position, come literally 
rlown upon Mother Pemble, or where Mother Pemble ought to 
be, and “face her out with it” in such a manner as to take 
away from her altogether the shield and cover of her supposed 
incapability. 

“ An’ when I ’m downright sure of what I ’ve got to go upon, 

— an’ she knows it, an’ can’t deny it, — she ’s got to give that 


436 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


room up vornterry t’ th’ deac’n, an’ git well, an’ stan’ li’ble t’ 
the same accountability ’s the rest ’v us ; an’ leave Uncle Amb, 
an’ his conscience, an’ the things on it, an’ his locks ’n keys, 
an’ the things under ’em, t’ ther own look-out f’r each other ’t 
the end ’v the chapter. ’R else, I ’ll turn it all over t’ the 
deac’n himself, ’n let him tutor her.” 

But now, even that would be distasteful. She was glad 
she had not got it to do. Things were straightening themselves. 
Spring days and the open house and the new summer-time, 
tying and blessing Sarell’s hands, might come : before any of 
them, that would have come which would settle all. A few 
days more, and the old secretary would have given up its 
secrets ; it might stand \inlocked. Mother Pemble might get 
upon her feet at her pleasure. The Tempter would have flouted 
her in the face with the years of her life that she had rendered 
up a sacrifice beforehand, and left her with her empty hands. 

Rael and his father would have their rights to-morrow ; the 
memorandum of all the rest lay there with the deacon’s keys, 
under his head. Nothing could be removed, so as not easily to 
be found again ; any such attempt would be a folly. 

Only, Mother Pemble did not know of the memorandum. 

And now, what was she doing, what had she done, stealing 
round up stairs there, with her bunches of keys 1 

At this moment, when she felt that everything was absolutely 
safe, Sarell simply wished that she could have put herself be- 
tween the miserable old woman and her shame. 

She listened. There was a creaking sound — she heard it 
twice ; but it was a slow creak, that might have been a door 
or a blind straining in the March wind, though she was per- 
suaded it was Mother Pemble’s foot upon the floor above. She 
waited to hear it upon the staircase, but there is a way of tread- 
ing on a creaking stair that defeats it. One has only to take it 
upon the edge, bearing weight exactly upon the upright ; and 
with hands and feet, and no rustling garments, a slight, wiry 
woman may pass over such a stairway like a cat. 

Not a sound told whether anybody had descended or not. 
But in a very few minutes. Mother Pemble coughed comforta^ 
bly and precisely in her own room. 


MOTHER PEMBLE’S ULTIMATUM; 


437 


Sarell was wise enough not to hurry. She sat a quarter of 
an hour upon the lounge, resting quietly back upon the cush- 
ion. Then she rose softly, looked in at the deacon’s door, saw 
Hollis giving him his brandy at the right time, and then turned 
back and walked over to the open passageway, slipped the loop 
of line from the press-room door, and knocked on Mother Pem- 
ble’s. 

Half a minute of silence, then she knocked again. A few sec- 
onds more, and Mother Pemble answered tremulously, with a 
just-awakened tone, “Care'line, is that youl” 

“ No, Missis Pemble. It ’s me — Sarell. Undo the latch ; I ’ve 
got someth’n t’ tell you.” 

The latch went up. As Sarell entered. Mother Pemble turned 
her voice toward her in the darkness. “ Is it Ambrose 1 ” she 
asked, with the conventional pathos. “Is he gone, poor soul?” 

“No, ma’am, not yet,” Sarell said very steadily. “ I’ll light 
y’r candle.” And she made her way across to the bedside, struck 
a match, and lit the home-made “ mould.” 

Mother Pemble looked at her eagerly, expectantly. In that 
quarter of an hour she had been satisfied that nobody had heard 
the drop of her keys — at any rate, to understand and place the 
sound. 

“ Missis Pemble,” said Mrs. Bassett, “ you ’ve ben up. Did 
y’ want anything?” She spoke as if quite of course, as if 
Mother Pemble usually got up when she wanted anything, like 
other people. 

But Mother Pemble was as sharp and cool as she. 

“You ’ve ben runnin’ o’ that notion a good while. Mis’ Bas- 
sett. Prewve it.” 

Sarell looked round the room in the dim light. She glanced 
at each point in turn ; last of all, toward the secretary. Her 
eyes, in passing round, took note that the attic-stairway door 
was iust — not — latched. But she made no comment upon 
that. 

Out of the secretary-front hung an inch of worn green string. 
She knew very well it had not hung so when they closed it that 
day before dinner. But she said nothing about that. 

Round by the bed again, she saw the square walnut chest 


438 ODD, OR EVEN? 

under the north window with its lid caught upon the hasp. 
She pointed to it. 

“You’ve ben up, an’ at that chist,” she said. 

“Y’r an evyl-mindid persecutor, Sarell Bassett,” said Mother 
Pemble. “That’s ben so, I don’ know how long. Sence las’ 
time Care’line went to ’t f ’r me. She never shets things.” 

“It’s ben so f’r less th’n half an hour. You lie. Missis Pern' 
ble.” Sarell spoke just as quietly, as smoothly, as if she had 
said, “ You ’re right, Mrs. Pemble.” 

Mother Pemble began to cry. “ I lie here,” she sobbed and 
whimpered, “ an’ you stan’ over me, an’ ensult me ; ’n what ef I 
could crawl that fur, ’m I bound t’ let the whole house know 1 
Ef I ’d hen a little mite better, an’ hed some hopes ’v myself th’t 
I kep’ t’ myself, for fear ’v disappintin’ some folks an’ bein’ put 
upon be others, would ye grudge it t’ me, Sarell 1 Ef y hed a 
girl o’ y’r own, you ’d know what ’t was t’ want t’ do f’r her, an’ 
save f’r her, I guess,” said the wdly old woman. 

“ Because ther’s sech reas’ns an’ feelin’s in the world, it ’s no 
sign you ’ve got ’em,” Sarell returned, possessing her soul in 
firmness. 

Mother Pemble was determined to be confidential, to the ex- 
treme of candor. 

“ I ’d jest as lives tell y’ as not,” she said. “ Now, ’t Am- 
brose — well, poor soul, never mind him now. 1 was gitt’n in- 
couridged, an’ in hopes t’ tell y’ all some day ; an’ I was doin’ 
the best I could t’ help myself. But I ain’t near so strong as 
I was.” 

“ Dare say y’ was, an’ dare say y’ ain’t,” returned Sarell, too 
utterly contemptuous to seem so, or to move a line of her coun- 
tenance, and speaking almost in a monotone. “ Don’t git so 
free t’ the strengthenin’ things, — milk-pitchers an’ custard-pies 
an’ new-laid eggs an’ blackberry corjil ; don’t hev s’ much fresh 
air ; hev t’ depend on the rubbin’ an’ the jimnastys. But y’ 
might, Missis Pemble. Y’ might be free to all. I don’t want 
t’ coop y’ up, nor keep y’ down. Ef ye ’ll jest come out as a 
able-bodied, responsible w'oman, y’re ’s free t’ the eggs an’ the 
milk an’ the pies an’ the corjil an’ the Lord’s sunshine ’s the 
rest ’v us. An’ the same things we ain't free to, you ain’t ; an’ 


MOTHER PEMBLE’S ULTIMATUM. 439 

it 's all aboveboard.” Only the accented words varied in tone 
from the cool, perfectly quiet monotony of the speech. 

Mrs. Pemble answered nothing. She pretended to be too 
abused and indignant. She fixed her eyes upon Sarell, as if 
they had been the eyes of an accusing angel. But she was se- 
cretly calculating how much or how little Sarell might know. 

“ I ’ve jest come t’ tell you this,” resumed Sarell. “ The 
deac’n he give me a memirander, yist’day, ’v all the money- 
papers he left there in that seckerterry ; an’ as I was the last 
one there vnth him^ I feel accountable. I sh’ll come back here 
in another half hour, Missis Pemble, with ’s many streps o’ 
paper with Sarell Bassett writ acrost ’em ’s the’s keyholes in 
that article ’v furnicher ; an’ a strep o’ paper ’ll be pasted over 
ev’ry soliterry keyhole. An’ nothin’ more c’n be took out, an’ 
nothin’ more c’n he put in. I might find y’ out. Missis Pemble ; 
but you ’d a grea’ deal better find yr’self out. An’ I ’d a sight 
ruther y’ would ! ” 

Sarell put her hand out, as she spoke, to the latch-cord, and 
detached it from the hook in the table. She rolled it over her 
fingers into a little skein, and went and hung it to a nail high 
up on the wall. “ I ’ll fix it f’r ye when I come back. Missis 
Pemble. I ’m sorry t’ disturb ye, but this is got t’ be attended 
to. I ’ll give ye a half hour ; an’ the’ shan’t nothin’ enterrupt 
ye.” She spoke very politely. 

She had reached the door, and held it in her hand, when 
something did interrupt them both. They both heard a quick, 
heavy step cross the keeping-room, and run up a few stairs upon 
the other side. 

“ Sarell ! Sarell ! ” called Hollis, in a hoarsely articulated 
whisper. “ Don’t be scar’t, but come quick. The’s a change ! ” 

Sarell slid through the door, and shut it hastily ; but even 
then she remembered to pass the knot of the strong fastening 
line around the press-room knob again. 

Mother Pemble remained motionless a minute or two. “ It ’s 
come,” she said, and then hushed herself breathlessly, as if to 
hear whether a soul took flight. 

“ Ef he hed n’t a ben Ambrose Newell, ’n ef he would n’t a 
made a white slave o’ me, an’ wore me out ’n left Care’line 


440 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 

with nobody t’ see after her — ” she said, and then left off 
again. 

She heard Sarell go in and call Care’line ; then all the house 
was very quiet. The door at the end of the passage into the 
keeping-room was shut. 

She grew calm. It was what she had known must happen — 
what she had looked for. Why should she be thrown out of 
her self-possession now 1 

“ She can’t prevwe nothin’, an’ she shan’t find nothin’. I ain’t 
held out these seven year t’ give in now. I HI lay !” That was 
Mother PembVs ultimatum. 


SAKELL GIVES ODDS AND COMES OUT EVEN. 441 


CHAPTER XLIV. 

SAKELL GIVES ODDS AND COMES OUT EVEN. 

Deacon Ambrose Newell died at four in the morning. 

There were no last words upon his lips. The last that he 
had spoken had been two hours before, when a slight revival 
gave back a flitting memory of the last things in his mind. 
He died as he had lived, among his money cares. Thanks only 
to Sarell that he had made friends of the Mammon in a little 
at the end. 

“Fetch Welcome,” he had said; “an’ Isril. Tell ’em — it’s 
twe — nty years too soon — I alwers meant — ef I was prospered 
— but I can’t talk. She ’s got ’em. She done it. It ’s all right. 
Only, I ’m feared I ain’t goin’ t’ live my time out. Sarell ! I 
did it in the freewill chance, y’ know % My keys, my papers, — 
give Welcome — ’’ 

Yes. “Give Welcome ” were the last words; and perhaps 
there were invisible ones ready to give welcome even to the 
poor, starved, dwindled remnant in him that had never grown 
up out of babyhood, but that was escaping now, when all that 
he had lived consciously was dropping down into the dust. 

It was six o’clock when Sarell came back into Mother Pem- 
ble’s room. Care’line was there now, sitting in the rocking 
chair. She had shed a few easy, comfortable tears, — that duty 
was disposed of, — and she was ready for the calm part of her 
affliction. For its central importance also. She had on a black 
afternoon gown, her collar was pinned straight, and a clean 
pocket-handkerchief lay on her broad lap. The neighbors, 
from the Centre and circumference, would be pouring in. The 
house would be full and busy all day long. 

Welcome and Israel would be here soon probably: Hollis 
had gone over for them. He had offered to take home on his 
way, the old wife who had been fetched at daylight, who was 


442 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


always fetched — the ghostly word suits well — when there were 
details of death and burial in a house. But Mrs. Streakham 
had thanked him in a surprised way, as one who knew no bet- 
ter. “ The’d be enough t’ do,” she said ; and settled herself 
to preside over the whole grim holiday. 

She came and looked in at Mother Pemble’s doorway now. 
“ Had n’t I best light a fire in the front parlor, Widder New- 
ell 1 ” she asked, giving Care’line her title, as an eager flatterer 
might a new-made lord. “ The ’ll be lots o’ comp’ny, an’ y’ 
won’t want to see ’em all in here.” 

“ Oh, jest as you think best, — you ’n Sarell,” Care’line an- 
swered, in a way that would have been moi’e significant of chief- 
mournerhood if she had not, in the sense of leaving every- 
thing to others, been a chief mourner all her life. 

But we do not care for these things. The result concerns us, 
— that in a little while Care’line was sitting in state in the front 
parlor, and Mother Pemble was likely at last to get her room 
to herself again. 

Sarell had quietly put her eleven bits of paper across the 
keyholes of the six drawers under the desk, the four high up 
above it, and the grooved slide-doors between, of the old secre- 
tary. It was her own device ; she had never heard of sealed 
drawers and doors before. When Care’line limply asked her 
what for, she had just said, “ While nobody hes any business 
with the keys, 1 thought mebbe ’t would be proper. ^Ir. Hey- 
brook ’ll see to it by an’ by.” 

“ Oh, how much he did think o’ them keys ! ” sighed Widder 
Newell, taking the word simply as a cue to her own role. 

“ Don’t be a fool, Care’line ! ” snapped Mother Pemble from 
the bed. Sarell liked her a little better for her non-pretence 
of grief But the thing Mother Pemble never could have any 
patience with in her daughter — all the same that for her own 
ends she would not really have had it otherwise just now — was 
that her listlessness reached even to the money and the keys. 

When Care’line went out, Sarell had stopped to reai'range 
Mother Pemble’s latch-cord, and with some pity in her heart 
for the really tired, pale face, had said, “ I ’ll bring you some 
breakfast. Missis Pemble, an’ then, I s’pose you ’ll take a nap.” 


SARELL GIVES ODDS AND COMES OUT EVEN. 44B 

“ Ain’t likely t’ be much nappin’ ’tween you ’n me,” muttered 
Mother Pemble, as Mrs. Bassett disappeared. 

When Welcome Heybrook and his son came, her latch was 
down. Nobody demurred at that. There was no need of going 
in at present. 

Sarell met the two in her bright, sweet kitchen, that she 
meant to have to herself and Hollis to-day, though people were 
offering to “ cook or to wash up or anything.” “ I c’n cook, ’n 
the’ ain’t no need t’ wash up,” she had answered proudly. 

She gave Mr. Heybrook the package of papers, the bunch of 
keys, and the slip of written memorandum. “ He died with 
his mind at rest,” was all her explanation. “ An’ now it ’s off 
my mind. You ’ll take charge.” 

Old Welcome was half bewildered, but Israel comprehended 
something. Father and son glanced together at the outside of 
the documents, as the former held them in his hands. Then 
the old man closed his fingers over them, and Israel turned 
away. Neither of them would be eager, in this first moment, 
to look further into his own benefit. Welcome moved toward 
the keeping-room. It seemed as if he must go to Ambrose 
first, before he could take to himself what Ambrose, lying there 
so empty-handed now, had left behind for him. 

Israel turned round to Sarell. “You’re a noble, good woman, 
Sarell,” he said warmly, taking her hand, “ and you will have 
your reward.” 

“ I thought he needed seein’ to, Rael,” Sarell said, with the 
first tremble in her voice that had been so calm and strong all 
the way through, “ or I would n’t never ’a left y’r mother.” 

And then Israel comprehended still moi-e. “That was it, 
then, all the time, when we were thinking you were in a hurry 
to please yourself? And you’ve done it for us, — what I’d 
never have asked for, if it had never been done ! Sarell, I ’m 
ashamed,” said the proud fellow. 

Sarell’s face quivered all over. “ ’T wa’ n’t th’t I should n’t ’v 
got merried all the same, some time,” she said loyally. “But it 
looked hard jest then, t’ be takin’ my own way, ’n walkin’ pride. 
Only, I see ’t was time somebody was here, f ’r a number o’ 
things,” she ended commonplacely, and then sat down in a chair 


444 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


beside her white, scoured table, on which she put both her arms 
suddenly, and her head on them, and cried and cried. 

I wonder if anything of a remotely suggested consciousness 
came to Rael Heybrook, with those words and tears, of an un- 
lived possibility of this girl’s nature, in which had rooted itself 
this devotion to his home and him 1 If there did, he felt it 
with a reverence. “ VVe shall prize you all our lives for this, 
you good, dear friend,” he said, his voice strong with gentleness. 
“ But don’t take on, you ’re all tired out.” He ended as common- 
placely as she had done. The speech that comes up on the in- 
stant from the deepest heart does but catch to itself its oldest, 
most familiar garment by the way. Israel laid the hand she 
had dropped from hers upon her shoulder, brotherly. 

“ She ’s ben up all night,” said Hollis, coming in. “ An’ she 
won’t let any o’ them folks out here to do an individgiwil thing ; 
an’ ther ’ll be dinners all day long, like ’s not. There ’s Flyn- 
ton Steele drivin’ in this minute.” 

“ You see to him and his horse, and keep them all off,” said 
Israel. “ I ’ll go back and fetch my mother.” 

So they took care of Sarell now, and it was time. Mrs. 
Heybrook came, loved her and kissed her, told her she could n’t 
have done more if she had been their own girl, and they never 
could make it up to her, but the Lord would, and her husband, 
and, — “ There ! there ! she must go now and get rested.” And 
she went with her up stairs, and made her lie down ; and while 
she spread some wrap round her shoulders and feet, she leaned 
over her and said, “ I used t’ think — but there, his looks must ’ev 
misreppersented him. He used t’ be so kind o’ fine, you know ; 
but he ’s stiddy an’ good, an’ ef a woman sets her mark, a man 
does somehow grow up to it, when she sets it lovin’.” 

Sarell clung an instant to the motherly shoulders. “Ef 
I’ve got any mark, f’r myself or f’r Hollis either, t’ help him 
grow up to, I ’ve got it livin’ with your folks. Mis’ Heybrook, 
an’ I ’m thankful ! ” 

Perhaps there is many a woman who goes through life with 
“ her mark set,” — where she has had some vision out of reach, 
at the height where she could love with all there is of her, — 
trying to love somebody up to it all the way; and perhaps 


SARELL GIVES ODDS AND COMES OUT EVEN. 445 


in the kingdom of heaven she finds that she has got him 
there. 

It was still and peaceful in Sarell’s attic-room, wide and sun- 
shiny though low, extending over both kitchen and outroom, 
with its little windows to the south and west. From her bed, 
as she lay, she could look across the hollow to the foot-bridge 
under the buttonwood trees over the brook, — the way that led 
by hill and field to the West Side and the Heybrook farm. 

It was all theirs back again now, and more too. There they 
were downstairs with the papers. They knew all now, and they 
would be so glad ; and it was her doing. 

She forgot all about Mother Pemble and the sealed locks. She 
remembered only the right, peaceful, thankful things, — how Rael 
had said they would prize her all their lives, how she had earned 
a place in their lives with them now, how everything was safe 
in their hands ; and while she thought she was only resting, she 
fell softly, deeply asleep, and slept the long forenoon through. 

Did Mother Pemble sleep ? After she had done one thing. 

There was that low stir in the house that covered all low 
stirring, — voices, subdued but incessant, and feet passing and 
repassing in the parlor, through the parlor-bedroom, keeping- 
room, and where the dead man lay. 'Doors were opened and 
shut ; there was sweeping and moving of things about ; then 
there was a luncheon-table and the clatter of dishes in the 
keeping-room. The surge of bustle that a country household 
keeps up when the neighbors all turn in and are to be politely 
entreated, and the preparations for a funeral go forward. 

There was time enough, and cover enough, for all Mother 
Pemble need do to-day. 

She had let it be too late for any other doing. Now she 
must go on, and she had not waited seven years to wish to do 
otherwise. 

Seven years for at best, perhaps, but a difference of three 
thousand dollars. 

But that was a vast difference to Mother Pemble. That, 
added to what was sure, meant opulence and consequence for 
all their days for herself and for Care’line. It meant a house 


446 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


and pretty front yard in town or village, the height of a retiring 
rural ambition ; a hired girl to do their work ; things as they 
wanted them, and nobody to tyrannize or dictate ; dreams 
fulfilled that she had lain here and dreamed, and carefully 
nursed and kept herself to enjoy. Not here, where people 
would notice and talk over and wonder how. There were other 
places, places where they would rather live. Anywhere, at any 
time, those papers were money, good for cash or for invest- 
ments, as Deacon Amb had said. 

It might not have turned out so ; half a dozen things might 
have prevented ; if those had been registered bonds even. But 
they were the last shape he had put his funds into that he might 
want again any day. Flynton Steele had said they were just 
as well, temporarily. Mother Pemble knew something about 
business or she would not have dared to meddle. She had been 
a widow herself, and had had money in bonds. 

“ Care’liue 1 ” — all these considerations went through Mother 
Pemble’s mind, as they had done many times before, — “Care’- 
line 1 Pshaw ! When did she ever trouble her head where 
money came from? What they had might grow. Flynton 
Steele was a good manager. They might ‘ be prospered ’ as the 
deacon had been, an’ Care’line never ’d inquire how. Nor 
Flynton would n’t go into^articklers, for that matter. Flynton 
would n’t have listened to any open word of settlin’ for herself 
in this way, before nor after ; but he knew Aunt Harriet 
was n’t a fool an’ never had been, an’ that Care’line could be 
turned over anybody's finger an’ not know it. Likely it was 
his doing, partly, that things was got back ev’ry little while into 
handy shape like that. 

“She had taken her chance, perhaps other folks had ; it might 
stand Flynton Steele in hand as much as anybody if things 
worked well for them, and he knew it. She had taken her chance 
and things had worked well ; ther’ was nothing got that was n't 
tried for. Now she had risked the last stroke, and ther’ was n’t, 
ther’ n't be, anything that anybody could prewve." 

“ After all, it was only their own back again, with what it 
ought to bring.” That was the little soothing breeze she kept 
up with the fluttering rag that was all she had left of her con- 
science. She was looking out for her own and Care’line’s. 


SARELL GIVES ODDS AND COMES OUT EVEN. 447 

If it had not been for this sharp Sarell and this watch and 
ward of hers that had gone on now, with a narrowing and con- 
centrating scrutiny and stringency, for mouths, and had cul- 
minated in the bold, prompt action of the last twenty-four hours, 
there would have been no trouble at all with her own final pro- 
cedures ; everything would have been in her own hands. But 
she had not been idle as to provisional thinking all the while 
that she had felt Sarell’s clever parallels investing her closer 
and closer ; and since the stroke of the sealed locks she had 
rapidly taken her mental measures, which needed only certain 
calculable opportunities for carrying out. 

Mother Heybrook had just looked in, and in her innocent, 
kindly fashion told her that she w’ould see to anything that was 
wanted, for Sarell was beat out and had gone to bed ; where- 
upon Mother Pemble had said that she had n’t had any rest 
herself all night, and if Mrs. Heybrook would have the goodness 
to fasten that door into the parlor, she guessed she ’d put her 
latch down and get a good sleep now, if she could ; after which 
Mother Heybrook herself did her best in warning off disturbance, 
and the coast was clear. 

She had made up her mind to one safe thing to do ; safe 
either way, for nothing could be “ prewved ” even if the nearly 
certain circumstances should not play in for her as she desired. 
It was her best move, and it could but fail. It was her very 
strongest chance, and it hardly could fail. 

She had thought over all that would be doing, all that would 
be wanting, all that she could count upon from others of un- 
conscious co-operation, and there was one way of getting her 
spoil out of her own territories and yet under such concealment 
as would keep it in her own knowledge and power for future 
access. Mother Pemble was a very quick-witted and “all- 
round ” woman. 

She crept up into that attic again. She did something there 
with a little use of scissors and some cautious stitches, — scru- 
pulously few and half drawn, — with a very strong, soiled thread, 
by which she was enabled to slide away and to secure, at the 
'same time leaving a most unguarded appearance of things, 
such as had been obvious for years, two thin, flat parcels pinned 
in soft old flannel wraps. 


448 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


It was down in a dusty, cobwebbed corner, just inside that 
eave-closet door ; nothing was moved more than could possibly bo 
helped ; in the careful replacing she even managed dexterously 
to catch the overhanging edge of a web that floated in dim 
palpableness and with tenacious grasp from a rough crossing 
beam. 

Some grim grotesqueness seemed to strike her as she turned 
to creep away. “ It ’ll foller after," she said in a half-breathed 
whisper, witli sinister-smiling lips and eyes, “ an’ it ’ll come 
back, like the rest, as cherfle ’s ever ! Then let ’em look ; let 
’em find it ef they can, an’ let ’em prewve it ! ” 

She slipped along down into her room again, holding with 
fingers as well as with her woollen-stockinged feet from edge 
to edge of the stairs. She took off and put back into the 
walnut chest the short wrapper she had had on over her bed- 
dress, and left the lid resting on its hasp as it had been in the 
morning. She was almost ready for her nap. 

There was one thing more she meant to do, but that must 
wait the next safely coming opportunity. ’ They would n’t open 
anything till after the funeral. 

When they did, she would have Flynton Steele called in on 
their part. He was like a good partner at whist : he might not 
know what was in her hand, he would n’t want to know, but if 
there was a card that needed to be played and it lay in his, he 
would play it for her good and for Care’line’s. 

Meanwhile, thinking this over after she had once more got 
back into bed, she unwound the large ball of gray yarn from 
which she was knitting and wound it up again, tucking some 
small, hard object away in the middle of it as she did so. And 
then she laid ball and work back beside her on the counterpane, 
turned her face inward from the windows, and went to sleep 
like a Napoleon. 

This was on Thursday. 

On Friday Flynton Steele drove over again. Care’line was 
in her mother’s room ; the parlor was appropriated ; the deacon 
lay there handsomely disposed of ; long rows of empty chairs 
stood waiting around the walls. 

, Mother Pemble kept somebody with her, now, all the tima 


SARELL GIVES ODDS AND COMES OUT EVEN. 449 

It was lonesome there, with only that door between, and there 
were other reasons. 

Flynton Steele came in ; he was careful, in these intermediate 
days, not to closet himself with Mrs. Pemble, but with the rest 
all in and out, he sat there talking with the restrained polite- 
ness people show to Death as they step slightly aside for him 
to pass who has no errand for themselves. 

So it happened that he and Mrs. Heybrook and Farmer Wel- 
come himself, who was just come to take his wife home to 
rest before the funeral, were all there when Hollis Bassett 
looked in at the door with a question for the widow. They were 
brushing up, outside, with vehicles and harness, for to-morrow’s 
procession. 

“ D’ y’ know. Missis Newell, where the deacon kep’ the cushins 
of the new chaise 1 ” 

Now the new chaise was new in the sense that the last horse 
raised upon the farm is always the colt ; it had been bought 
more than a dozen years ago, — a wide, comfortable thing in 
which the deacon in the elder time had driven his two women- 
folks, country-bodkinwise, in and out of Reade and Hawksbury. 
For many years of late it had been rarely taken out ; the deacon 
preferred either the open, one-seat wagon or the ancient gig for 
his own use, according to his errands. 

“ Why, yes, Hollis, t’ be sure,” answered the widow serenely. 
“ In the keepin’ room attic ; I guess likely in the eave-cluzzit. 
You c’n go right up.” 

Which Hollis did, returning with the two solid, square cush- 
ions, — the leather bottoms stiff with old damps and dust, and 
places in each where the seams had started slightly along the 
edges. But they were the “ new ” cushions, kept sacredly away 
from the common stowage of the barn, where the chaise stood 
in a shroud of old quilts. 

“ How long it is sence that ’s ben out before ! ” said Care’line, 
with her bereaved sigh. 

Mother Pemble had securely counted on some such auxiliary 
sentiment as this. Things happened very well. 

“ I hope you won’t let that shay be sold off, Care’line, — ef 
things air sold,” she said, as Hollis, followed by Farmer and 

29 


450 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


Mrs. Heybrook, went out of the room, and Flynton Steele 
also rose to go. “You ain’t rid much lately, but you want 
something you could ride in ; an’ that ’s low and big an’ easy. 
Flynton ’ll see to it — an’ anything else you like — when the 
time comes.” And Mother Pemble left it there, in deference to 
the silent halt, close to them, of that Passer-by. 

There had been just enough of careful emphasis on the 
words that referred to Flynton. 

“ My cousin may call on me for any service I can be to her,” 
said Mr. Steele, with a not absolutely accurate elegance, and 
recognizing some lead which, without wholly understanding, he 
was to follow. He made a note in his mind of the old chaise, 
— I beg pardon, the new one. Mother Pemble never troubled 
her mind very much with anything unless it “signified.” 

The funeral took place on Saturday. We will dwell on noth- 
ing that we need not ; there is little room — and can be little 
relish — for a lingering over the closing particulars of this por- 
tion of our story. The hankering after such, in the circum- 
stance of any death, — of body or of soul, — is morbid. 

Sarell had sat, with bonnet on, in the small household group, 
during the funeral prayers. Then, when the widow and Flyn- 
ton Steele, Farmer Heybrook and his wife, his two boys, and 
the minister had gone forth, and Hollis, fully expecting to take 
his wife beside him in the neat light wagon he had provided, 
and that was standing in its turn before the door, came in for 
her, she quietly whispered, “ I ’m pretty tired, Hollis, an’ I ’d 
full as soon be th’ one t’ see t’ the house. You take Mis’ 
Streakham, — yes, do, that ’s a good fellow, — she wants t’ go.” 
And Hollis, much amazed, and also greatly disgusted, consid- 
ering his best clothes and the tidy team he had hired with his 
old love of driving off in style, had to turn round and give 
his arm to the lady in the rusty black bonnet and thin “Cyprus” 
veil that were associated with all occasions like the present in 
Fellaiden as regularly as the black-draperied “ narrow carriage,” 
and who, on her part, with concurrent arrangement, already 
stood up, waiting. 

And so, at last, in the stillness and balminess of one of the 
exceptional spring days, the long train of various vehicles filed 


SARELL GIVES ODDS AND COMES OUT EVEN. 451 

away around the hill ; and the house in the Hollow was left 
open, hushed, empty, — as a house only is when there has just 
been such a departure from it. 

Sarell had had a seat within the parlor bedroom, near the 
closet-passage, open also now, into Mother Pemble’s room. 
When the services were over, and a few women who had been 
in the “ east room ” had come forth, she had slipped behind 
them and stood quietly in the inner doorway. 

“ ’S that you, Sarell 1 ” asked Mother Pemble, from the bed. 
“ I wish t’ mercy you ’d shet me up ’fore y’ go. I can’t hev 
Goody Streakham cornin’ in. I ’m clear wore out.” 

Sarell came in, closing and fastening the door behind her ; 
then, without further word, passed through into the keeping- 
room passage, closing that door also, and slipping the loop of 
cord that still hung from the press-room knob over its handle, 
as she went ; and regaining her place in the parlor, she gently 
pushed the door of the closet entrance to and turned the key. 
Then, her mind quite made up to what she had already been 
considering, she had spoken to Mrs. Streakham, and confounded 
Hollis, as we have seen. 

Sarell stood at the porch door a few minutes, looking forth 
upon the sweet quiet of blue air and flecking clouds and pale- 
gray hills, — of the springing green of the earth, and fretwork 
of budding branches against the sky. She took off her bonnet 
and dropped it upon a chair ; then she walked out and around 
to the open shed-way, and so through to the keeping-room. 
There she paused again for a little, thinking how strange it all 
was, and how long ago it seemed that she had passed the day 
and night there that had been the old man’s last chance of 
“ clear freewill.” 

She had no distinct intention of watching for anything now. 
She only felt it right she should be there, about the place. She 
had supposed that all effective watching was over, save that of 
maintaining the certainty that there could be no outside free- 
dom from those two rooms, where whatever was to be cared for 
must still be. Presently, she went slowly up the stairs to her 
own end of the house. These were solid old oaken stairs, built 
in with the chimney ; there was no creaking with these, and 


452 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


Sarell’s shoes were silent. But as she passed upward, she dis- 
tinctly heard that slow creak again, — quite near overhead. 
She went on, quickly and softly, into her own room ; the eave- 
closet door was ajar. 

The stairway, the chimney, and a closet over the stairs 
were between her and the little attic. She could hear no sound 
now, and she was secure that no slight sound of hers could be 
perceived. She slipped off her dress and put on a flannel sacque. 
All her other clothing was soft and noiseless. 

Behind the chimney, against the slope of it, was the partition 
of the closets in the eave. The two boards removed had been 
the last, short ones in the low space. Beyond the opening 
there lay a feather-bed, bundled up in an old “ patch.” This 
she had just squeezed aside, so as to leave a creeping-path 
behind it toward the other end. On her own side she had kept 
some little pile of clothing that had covered and darkened the 
access. 

After all, her time had come to use this way that she had 
made. 

She had necessarily occupied some minutes ; it was so still 
that she dared not go forward, and it seemed as if the place 
must be again vacant. 

But presently she heard a sliding sound. “ Can that be 
possible ? ” she thought ; and immediately withdrew into her 
room again, where she went and sat down upon the floor behind 
some screening pots of little plants in one of the low, oblong 
south windows. 

There were two of these in this room, and one in the small 
attic. They were, perhaps, two and a half feet high. The one 
from the attic was scarcely three feet above the slightly sloping 
roof that ran down from a little above the second floor of the 
main house, over the built-on parlor-bedroom and a stoop beyond, 
at whose edge it came nearly to the level of the top of the well- 
ciirb that stood a little way from its outer corner, just within 
the line of a quadrangle enclosed on three sides by the stoop, 
the house extension, and the open shed facing the well. 

An agile person might, perhaps, get down and up again by the 
planking of the curb, which was within a long step and grasp 
of the simple double and crosspieced support of the stoop. 


SAKELL GIVES ODDS AND COMES OUT EVEN. 45H 


Was that possible for Mother Pemble? 

At any rate, there was Mother Pemble now, out upon the 
roof. The low window-ledge, almost level with the floor, and 
the slight drop outside, gave her all this scope and chance of 
freedom, — freedom, even, over the whole farm. Sarell wondered 
she had never thought of that before, 

I But now she was exaggerating the possibilities. Mother 
Pemble could not go all over the farm, though within a cer- 
tain none the less surprising limit she had undoubtedly 
ranged. In her square chest and up here in her packed-away 
trunks, she had access to her clothing, of whatever sort ; and 
in her own room she had convenience for restoring to order 
whatever traces might have been otherwise left of soil or use. 
Mother Pemble had taken energetic care not to get bedridden 
in earnest. 

As she sat there now, evidently enjoying the sweet, soft, 
open air, she was a curious figure to Sarell’s sight, observing 
her from between the screening stems of her geraniums and 
heliotropes. 

She was in a rambling — or scrambling — costume, exactly 
adapted to her purposes ; and in it she presented, as she sat 
there upon the roof, — her knees raised by her feet drawn 
under her, and her arms clasped round them, — in a short, 
rough jacket of some common fur that had probably been a 
man’s overcoat, such as the farmers here drove about in in the 
winter time, loose, dark woollen trousers, no impeding skirt, 
and a close-fitting, horizontally projecting quilted black silk 
hood, — an aspect that instantly accounted to Mrs. Bassett’s 
mind for Dr. Fargood’s apparition of the dog. 

“ She ’s worked hard ! ” Sarell ejaculated with scornful breath. 
“ She ’s worked hard. An’ I wonder what sort V ’n opinion 
she ’s ben able t’ keep up ’v herself thriew it alll She ’s a kind 
V a reddle, an’ a awfle crooked one, — that woman ; but I 
persume the ol’ Father o’ lies keeps track o’ th’ spellin’ ov it, 
an’ deac’ns it out to her ’s she goes along, — Now what ’s she 
up to 1 ” 

Mother Pemble crept down the slope, and along the stoop- 
roof, to the point opposite the well. There she sat down, upon 


454 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


the very edge, with one hand, that seemed to hold some small 
thing, raised; she leaned forward carefully, holding on with 
the other hand down. beside her, clutching the shingles; she 
stretched her right hand over, the object in it lightly grasped 
between the extremes of thumb and fingers ; she made one or 
two little swinging motions with it, as measuring accurately 
aim and distance ; then she gave a toss, — they say a woman 
never throws, — and something described a slight parabola over 
the framing curb, and dropped plumb into the very centre of 
the well. 

“ That don’t need tellin’,” said Sarell. “She ’s took care ’v 
the keyT And as Mother Pemble turned to creep up the roof 
again, Sarell vanished from her post and sped round, through 
the partition passage, to the eave-closet, taking with her, as she 
passed through her own division of it, a stout knitting-needle 
that was thrust there in readiness in a crevice behind a beam. 
This she slipped through the wide crack of the time-shrunken 
door, pushed upward a loose old wooden button, and let herself 
softly into the south attic. 

“ I could keep her out there t’ll the kerridgeS all come home,” 
considered Mrs. Bassett with herself, as she stooped low to 
approach the sliding window, and reaching it, knelt down and 
laid her hand upon its frame. “ But — come to — I guess I c’n 
give her that odds, ’n be even with her, yit. An’ I ’d dispise, 
now, t’ scare her inf tellm' me anything. — Too,” she inter- 
rupted herself with a briskly worded thought, “ ’f I hev f ask 
anybody, ’t might be some body more rispecf ble ! Ef Rael 
Heybrook’s dog hed one sniff ’v that wallet, he ’d nose out any' 
thing th’t hed been in it, all over the farm.” 

So Sarell calmly removed her hand, drew herself back to 
where she could stand, and listened an instant ; heard Mother 
Pemble’s steps approaching over the shingles, and flitted into 
the closet shelter, with the door not quite shut to. 

Mother Pemble knelt up, and writhed in, head foremost, at 
the window, then sat down on the floor inside. She was close 
to her own stairway, now, and she could afford to linger. The 
sweet southwest wind blew round her, and stirred all through 
the close, little, shingly-smelling chamber. 


SARELL GIVES ODDS AND COMES OUT EVEN. 455 

“ It ’s a proper pleasant day,” the old woman said softly, 
just as if she had the most innocent right to enjoy it; and she- 
unfastened the horizontal hood, and unbuttoned the thick fur 
jacket, and let both slip back upon her shoulders. 

“ ’An to-morrer ’s Sunday ; an’ Monday — well, let ’em hunt I 
Let ’em prewve something, now ! The’s no key but the blessed 
deac’n’s ; ’n wherever things is he must a put 'em. They ’ll be 
smart, though, ef they think of lookin’ in a ol’ — ” 

Sarell was close by ; but the half-murmured words failed te 
distinguish themselves to her, thus far; only at this point,, 
the old woman, sitting in the fresh air, sneezed — 

“ Shay-cushin ! ” 

The word had been formed upon her lip ; the sudden co-nvul- 
sion drove it forth in forced articulation and spasmodic 
violence. 

That which had been done secretly in the closet was pro- 
claimed literally, and by the very doer, upon the house-top. 

Sarell went out to her husband in the dooryard when the 
carriages had come home. 

A boy from the Centre was to drive back the hired team. 
Hollis was unhitching the gray horse from the new chaise. 

“ S’pose I might ’s well leave this jest as ’t is now,” he said, 
as she stood by till he wheeled the vehicle back into its recess 
in the old barn. 

“ I ’d kevver it up,” said Sarell. 

“ I mean the cushins. They ’ll do well enough ; I e”!! turn 
the luther sides up.” 

“ Where did y’ fetch them cushins from 1 ” inquired his wife. 

“ Why, the south attic, w’here the deac’n kep’ ’em ; but they 
re better off here, where they ’ll be ’tended to. They was all 
dust ’n cobwebs.” 

“ Hollis, when the folks is all gone to-night, you fetch them 
cushins in to me.” 

“ What furl” 

“ So ’s ’t I c’n ’tend to ’em properly. — The ’ might be a rat’s 
nest inside.” 

On Monday they opened the old secretary. 

Papers were found in abundance, but all carefully docketed 
and filed ; it did not take three men long to run them ever. 


456 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


Mother Pemble lay against her pillows, knitting. 

The leather wallet was there, under the sliding lid ; there 
were papers in that also, worn and creased with long lying ; but 
no fresh ones, nothing that represented money. 

“ That’s surprisin’,” said Farmer Heybrook, holding the mem- 
orandum in his hand. But he said it much as if his capacity 
for being surprised were exhausted. 

“ Better look thurrer, while ye ’ve got it in hand,” trebled 
Mother Pemble from the bed. “I’d ruther — Care’line ’n I 
would — y’ should n’t leave the house ’thout findin’ out what 
<s in it, ’n where ’bouts.” 

“ What other places is the’ — locked ? Ambrose was a 
kerfle man,” said Welcome. 

“ Care’line c’n tell ye, — y’ c’n try all the keys ; but I guess 
they ’re mos’ly old ones th’t don’t b’long t’ nothin’. Th’ deac’n, 
he was fond o’ keys ; alwers kerried a whole bunch. Git ’em 
all th’ keys ’n th’ house, Care’line, — an’ show ’em all the 
locks.” 

“ La, ma ! ” said Care’line, and then stopped to sigh her 
bereaved sigh again, as if the levity of the “ La ! ” had been 
hardly lawful. “ The’ never was nothin’ locked up ’n th’ whole 
place, — but your things an’ the deac’n’s seckerterry.” 

“Well, — they c’n look ’n my things, then,” said the old 
woman. “ They ’d best do th’ whole job up, so’ s ’t the’ can’t 
over be nothin’ said.” 

“ I think everything ought to be here. I think he said so to 
Sarell,” said Israel Heybrook, disregarding the little interlude. 

He came here to look over his papers, she told me, the day 
before he died.” 

“ Ask Mrs. Bassett to come in,” said Flynton Steele. 

Sarell came in. “ Where did you understand Deacon Newell 
tbf.t these papers were 1 ” he asked her, taking the memorandum 
from Farmer Hey wood’s hand, and signifying with it. 

‘ In a luther wallet, in that seckerterry ; in a right-hand 
p'veon-hole, under a led. That ’s what I understood the day 
’fore he died, when he wanted ’em t’ look over.” 

There is nothing there of any importance to look over. 
Has the secretary been opened since?” 


SARELL GIVES ODDS AND COMES OUT EVEN. 457 

“ I sh’d persume not. But I can’t say.” 

Mother Pemble was knitting on industriously ; but she 
changed her needle at this moment, and sent a sharp glance 
over her glasses at Sarell. Mrs. Bassett never looked her way 
at all. 

“Who put the seals on?” 

“ I did ; fust chance I got after I knew Deac’u Amb never ’d 
git here agin nex’ day, ’s he meant to, t’ see t’ things himself.” 

“ Curious, was n’t it, you should happen to think of such a 
thing? You ’re quite a woman of business, Mrs. Bassett.” 

“ The’s a good many things in the world th’t ’s cur’ous, Mr. 
Steele,” returned Sarell coolly. “ But I ain’t, nor yet a busi- 
ness woman, nerry one. I ’m just straightforrud, ’n’v got com- 
mon sense ; that ’s all.” 

Something in Sarell’s eyes seemed as if the trick were not to 
be taken that way ; she looked as if she might play a trump. 
Mr. Flynton Steele changed his fingering of the cards. 

“Did Deacon Newell tell you, when you made this memo- 
randum, that the papers mentioned were in this secretary ? ” 

Sarell was silent, recollecting. She called back to her mind 
the exact words that had passed between her and the old man. 

“ No, sir,” she replied. “ He said the’ was more ; an’ I asked 
him ef he hed n’t better le’ me make a memmirander ’v w'hatever 
the’ was. That ’s percisely what I asked him, an’ all he said. 
*N then he d’rected it off t’ me, an’ I made it.” 

Mr. Steele turned to the secretary. 

“ Did y’ want to ask me any more questions ? ” said Sarell. 

“ Not at present, Mrs. Bassett.” 

“ When y’ do, I ’ll answer ’em t’ the best o’ my knowledge 
an’ ability.” And Sarell departed. 

They went through all the papers again ; opened every 
drawer, examined every pigeon-hole and compartment. 

“ They certainly are not here,” said Flynton Steele. “ They 
may be anywhere, or nowhere. The old man may have tucked 
them away, or he may have disposed of them ; or his mind 
may have been a little wandering among old things ; there was 
nobody with him but that young woman, and she could hardly 
judge.” 


458 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


“ Sarell has a great deal of common sense and faithfulness,” 
said Israel Heybrook, reverting to her own simple claim for 
herself, and emphasizing it. “If anybody can suggest any- 
thing, — unless you, Mr. Steele, have some clew to his manage- 
ment of things lately, — perhaps she can ; but it will be of her 
honest judgment and observation, if she does;” he purposely 
used the word assertive of the quality Mr. Flynton Steele had 
denied her, — “ she won’t be in a hurry to intrude.” 

“ We can call her back, then,” said the double cousin. “ No, 
;Mr. Israel, I do not know the recent disposition of Mr. Newell’s 
affairs. I have, from time to time, within the last few months, 
made sales for him, and paid him money, for which I have his 
receipts ; and I remember once his asking me about registered 
and not registered bonds. If these were registered, we can find 
out about them easily enough ; but if not, — well, he could n’t 
have disposed of so much money, I should say, without its 
being traceable ; but he may never have had it all at once in 
his possession ; or he may, as I said, have stowed it away queerly. 
People do such things, sometimes. Mrs. Bassett seems to have 
had a good deal of the care of matters here. Suppose you do 
see if anything will occur to her ? ” 

Sarell was called back. 

“ We do not find all the papers, Mrs. Bassett,” said Flynton 
Steele to her. “ We cannot verify your memorandum. Do you 
know of — can you suggest — any place where we had better 
look for them 1 ” 

There was just a shade again of that tentative browbeating, 
which might be followed up, or backed down from, as circum- 
stances should develop. 

Sarell answered not a word, but turned and walked out of 
the room. 

“ She ’s affronted,” said Care’line. 

“ Sarell does n’t know anything she ought not to,” spoke up 
Rael Heybrook ; and Flynton Steele recognized through the 
quiet tone something that it would not do to affront in him. 
“ Oh no, I imagine not,” he said carelessly. 

And with that, Sarell was back again. 

^ She held forth two flat parcels, pinned smoothly in thin flan- 


SARELL GIVES ODDS AND COMES OUT EVEN. 459 


nel cloths. They were between the tips of her two thumbs and 
fingers. 

“ I sidgest these,” she said. “ Is these anything like ’em 1 ” 

Rael came across the room to her. Some curious association 
with her words, in the keen humor under their quaint dignity, 
flashed a gleam of amusement over his gravely bright face. 
“ Have you caught the rooster again, Sarell 1 ” he asked her, 
in low, pleasant italics that nobody quite apprehended but 
herself. 

Sarell’s face shone all over, and her eyes met his all alight. 
She felt suddenly gay and dancing in her very heart. 

Eael Heybrook understood her. A perception, deep enough 
for surface play and sparkle, was between them. In that little 
allusion there was implied and conceded her old and con- 
tinued household oneness with them. Rael was her thorough, 
trustful, thankful friend; the word of quick recognition in a 
slight thing came easily. That proud, sober Israel ! There are 
friendships and friendships, thank the Lord of all our human 
hosts. Sarell was satisfied. 

Mr. Flynton Steele took the parcels from Rael, who offered 
them. 

“ Where did you find these, Mrs. Bassett ? ” he demanded, in 
a certain judicial way. 

Sarell answered like a shrewd witness, who has had her hand 
on the Book, but who, perhaps, from something inside the 
Book, is held to a discretion. 

“ I looked into things — last night — a little, — an’ straight- 
ened ’em — in the deac’n’s room,” she said measuredly. “ An’ 
I found them — under a cushin-kevver. That ’s p’utty much 
all I care ’bout sayin’ ; but you c’n ask me more queschins, ’f y’ 
want to ; an’ I 'll answer 'em." 

Sbe never once looked toward the bed. Mother Pemble sat 
there, with a face that was neither pale nor red nor livid nor 
contorted, — that was simply struck so, as one might say ; as 
common people do say it, with the adverbial addition of “ all 
in a heap.” 

“ Do you know what is in them 1 ” 

“ I ain’t looked. They ’re pinned thriew, an’ you won’t find 
but one set o’ pin-holes. They ’re percisely as I found ’em.” 


460 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


Flynton Steele turned back to the secretary. Israel’s face 
had the look of absolute faith in her, and in whatever unknown 
discretion of her reticence, that was full and generous reward. 
Farmer Heybrook simply waited, mystified alike by good for- 
tune and the obliquities of its approach. Care’line never asked 
questions. 

“ I c’n go ? ” inquired Sarell, still never looking at the bed. 

But Mother Pemble revived with a sting of intense, irrepres- 
sible spite. 

“ Them that hides, c’n find,” she half hissed, half muttered. 

“ Sh — h ! ” articulated Flynton Steele, reproachfully or warn- 
ingly, as it might be, from over the footboard ; emphatically, at 
any rate. 

Then Sarell turned round and looked straight at Mother 
Pemble. 

The weather had changed. The day was raw and gusty. 
Sarell had left the doors open behind her. 

Mother Pemble, as she looked at her, sneezed. One does 
that, perhaps, even in a fright or a grief. 

“ I wish you ’d go out, or shet the doors,” said the old woman 
vindictively. “ You ’ve set ’em wide open all thriew th’ house. 
I ’m gitt’u my death-a-cold.” 

Sarell came up to the bedstead. She took a shawl and drew 
it up round the miserable old shoulders without touching them. 
She spoke low, but clearly, beading over Mother Pemble’s head. 

“ The doors — an winders — hez been open a good deal lately,” 
she said. “ I don’t doubt a mite you hev got cold. I should n’t 
wonder ’f you begun it Sat’day. Folks must be ketchin’ awfle 
colds, when they ’re took a-sneezin’ — shay-cushins” The last 
sentence dropped to something very softly illustrative in a 
whisper ; besides which, Flynton Steele covered the speech, as 
it progressed, with the wheeling round of the deacon’s great 
desk-chair to seat himself in it, and then wheeling it back 
again when he had done so, to face the secretary. 

Sarell went out, and shut all the doors. They might be 
shut now; she had no need, no wish, to open them any 
more. 

“You ’d better let that young woman alone. Aunt Harriet," 


SARELL GIVES ODDS ANT) COMES OUT EVEN. 461 

Flynton Steele found opportunity to say to Mrs. Pemble just 
before he left, himself, to go back to Hawksbury. 

We may go, too ; we shall have no need to come back to the 
east room or to its inmate. 

And I hope you are as glad to be done with Mother Pemble 
as I am. 


462 


ODD, OK EVEN i 


CHAPTER XLV. 

NINE FROM NOUGHT, AND FELLAIDEN NEWS. 

It is no use to talk about “ the world.” There are as many 
worlds as there are things to do in it and motives to do from. 
There are whole spheres of people, — they talk about spheres, 
but they never mean it literally, as it is, — circulating and cir- 
culating, all to themselves, in their real life and centres, as 
much as if they were set off in space in a system. Only these 
spheres, like all the realities, interpenetrate each other ; and we 
cross each other’s tracks, and think we are on the same because 
while we are near the angle we are near each other, but pres- 
ently shall find ourselves whole infinitudes apart. 

Set out on any idea you will : if it lead you, you drift surely 
into its connection and conformity, and no other. Everything 
else is collateral to its forces. And it is only when you get into 
a particular drift that you find out the fellowship of it. From 
positive philosophy to postage stamps, — from political economy 
to the fashion of trailed gowns, — from church to charity fairs, 
— engaging yourself with whatever, you find yourself taking 
to people, and people taking to you, whom, and in a way that, 
you would otherwise have had no recognition or experience of 
“Set,” — “sort,” — neither expresses it. It is organism. 

There were people in Boston — a whole related order of peo- 
ple — whom France did not know, except as persons of a certain 
social level know that each other are, and salute when they 
meet at the grade crossings of their paths. Until, all at once, 
this need of doing something — this pressing home of the per- 
ception that there must be one help more somewhere in the 
world for her being in it,, or there would be no help to that very 
being of her own — came full upon her. 

' She went to Devereux Hartie, the Professor of Moral Mathe- 


NINE FROM NOUGHT, AND FELLAIDEN NEWS. 403 

matics. She knew him as a gentleman ; so she could speak to 
him. She thought he belonged, in a measure certainly, to her 
own circle ; she was to find out what a different thing it would 
be to belong to his. (I would mention that Devereux Hartie 
was a Reverend ; but they tell me I can’t get along at all with- 
out a minister, and it rather hampers me ; yet as to that, all I 
have to say is. Who can 1) 

“ I want to come into your class in arithmetic,” she said 
playfully. 

“0, — multiplication table!” he queried in reply. “Ten 
times — ” 

“ I ’m not so far on as multiplication,” returned France. 
“I ’m in subtraction. Nine from nought you can’t, you know ; 
so borrow ten and carry one. I come across a nought now and 
then.” Still with that cover of sport, and still with the earnest- 
ness underneath. 

The Professor of Mathematics laughed gently ; the response 
to the earnestness was in his look. 

“ There is nothing else for it — in the whole science,” he 
said. “ Borrow your ten, — to mrry. You must come into our 
Cheerful Club, Miss France.” 

“ I would if I knew how.” 

“ We don’t do anything hxd borrow,” he said, — “ and lend. 
We shine round, in a small, mooulighty way, into dull places. 
We borrow books, and lend them ; we borrow pictures, and have 
a ’circulating simulacracy; we borrow things to work with, — 
patterns, materials, — and we work them up. This year we have 
a little Winter Flower Mission; the flowers that have done 
duty for an evening, at a dinner table or in the girls’ bouquets, 

— they handle and freshen them tenderly, thinking of this, — 
or borrowed from their conservatories and flower-stands ; we 
borrow everything ; money, when we must, — never pay, that’s 
not included, — and lend that out, carefully. Borrow all along 
the line, and let it come out of the big last figure ; the subtra- 
hend always looks the largest till you come to that ; and then 

— you see.” 

“ I see ; it has to leave the noughts all there, after all.” 

“ The more little figures and noughts to take from, the bigger 


464 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


the leading numeral turns out to be. Has to. That ’s never a 
nought. Here eudeth the first lesson. Go and talk to Mrs. 
Kellis Waite, and tell her to briug you the next Club night.” 

So she went to Mrs. Kellis Waite, feeling like Mousie in the 
story, running round and round to earn back her own •'* long 
tail again.” 

Mrs. Kellis Waite set her to work on half a dozen things, — 
borrowing, enlisting gay girls in the bouquet mission, wait- 
ing letters to postmasters and pastors all over the country map, 
inquiring out people and places to send little holiday-seekers to 
next summer, from the “ poor streets ” of the hot city. And 
she took her to Mr. Devereux Hartie’s on the Cheerful Club 
night. 

France found people in it whom she had seen only in occa- 
sional surface w^ays before, people who she had no idea had 
this world behind the other ; she felt as if they had stolen a 
march upon her, and very nearly left her out. So surprised are 
we when we discover that the same sort of napkin with which 
we have hidden our talent has been with our neighbor but 
decently folded as a napkin, vjhile the money has gone and 
been multiplied over and over again among the exchangers. 

She found also new people, a whole clan and kindred of 
them, who wore hats and coats and gowns that covered up 
their angelhood, and walked among the crowd as if no different 
from it, but rather liker and humaner to each particle of it. It 
made her feel behindhand, — as if she must make haste, as if 
she must begin and grow up all over again. If she had counted 
up her life in this wise, and set her sum of it, perhaps she would 
not — so soon — have come to that nought in her arithmetic. 

There was some danger in her hurry ; there is danger in all 
hurry, and in too much of the tangential, even among the 
heavenly forces. The heavenly bodies must not rush nor 
spurt ; the entirest motion is that which seems not to be a 
motion, or a change of place at all. 

“Don’t take up everything,” Miss Ammah told her. “The 
Lord seldom gives one great, outside mission ; He never gives 
half a dozen at a time.” 

Miss Ammah watched her. She knew' she had been trying 
to take nine from nothing, somewhere. 


NINE .FROM NOUGHT, AND FELLAIDEN NEWS. 465 

One and another drew her into this and that ; that is the way 
in the City of Good Works. 

Each good work was good, "was needful ; was admirable, 
often, in its execution as in its inception ; but the aggregate of 
them, and that which the aggregate revealed — namely, the terri- 
ble mass and complication of the needs, the frightful multiply- 
ing and differencing of that mysterious element of Wrong in 
the world, that these outside remedies, working at the surface 
and unable to get at the heart, were trying to right — dismayed 
her. It was such a big world, so irretrievably snarled up before 
she belonged to it ; she almost wondered what she was put here 
to be discouraged for. 

A good deal of this was subjective, no doubt ; there had been 
a hitch in the running of her own young life, and it made her 
feel all the retarding, contrary action, — all the “keeping on 
without ever coming to it,” as she expressed it to Miss Ammah, 
— that was set in the very laws of things, and the shape the 
world had taken. 

“ It zs a ‘ round and round,’ Miss Ammah,” she said one day, 
coming in at the Berkeley, after a hospital visit with Mrs. 
Waite, — where she had heard of five cases that there were no 
beds for, — and an hour at a mission class, — where one bright, 
wicked little girl had gleefully told her that “ Nancy was n’t 
coming any more, and she guessed she ’d leave off too after to-day, 
now she’d got her apurns done.” “ It ’s just over and over, 
and finding youi-self back at the beginning all the time. And 
you can’t more than toticA it, after all.” 

“ Well, that’s the way of the sun, too,” replied the good 
lady ; “ and the mornings and evenings will have to keep being 
the days, as long as the earth stands, I suppose. But I ’ll fel^ 
you. There ’s a mistake in it, too. And with a good many of 
you it is n’t so much like the evenings and mornings as it is like 
something I saw and laughed at one day, and laid up for a 
moral, in Fellaiden, last summer.” 

“Oh, do give me a breath from Fellaiden ! ” France responded, 
parting her lips as if to draw in a great gasp of mountain 
freshness after the choke and flurry and sickening miasm. 

“ It was a sudden, pelting shower,” said Miss Ammah, “ and 

30 


46C 


ODD, OK EVEN ? 


three half-grown turkeys were running round and round a 
gooseberry bush, looking for a shelter. They kept on, heads to 
tails, just following each other, out in the rain all the time, and 
never knowing that they were running in a circle. They were 
worse off than if there had n’t been any gooseberry bush. If 
they had only dived in somewhere, to some one little corner ! ” 

“ But I suppose they were n’t near any, and there was noth- 
ing but the bush to beat about,” said France, forgetting after 
all to take her long breath, or finding something in the way of 
it. “ I think people who have a corner are a great deal the 
best ofii The big round outside is too much for anybody ! ” 

“ And it always will be,” said radical Miss Ammah, “ so long 
as it ’s taken at the outside. Besides which it grows huger and 
huger, and they have the farther and the faster to run. If 
everything was right, — mind I don’t say you should do nothing 
at all outside until it is, — but if everything was right in the 
midst of things, there would n’t be the lots of frameworks round 
things that take up the strength and material now. No politics, 
but only honest working at public work ; no police of charities, 
but just everybody loving his neighbor as himself, and so ready 
with his right hand that the need would never get round so far as 
to let the left hand know. The ought of everything would be the 
‘owing,’ — look in your Webster for that, — and we should all 
be paying our small debts, and the public debt would be getting 
paid with it, as we went along.” 

“ They have to begin with that in the small places,” said 
France, and her Fellaiden breath exhaled in a sigh of recol- 
lection. The things that Israel Heybrook had said to her that 
afternoon up on Crowned Head came back to her, and she went 
off thinking about them, not much freshened, truly, by the Fel- 
laiden air Miss Ammah had uncorked from a bottle. 

Rael and Mr. Kingsworth and that Miss Leonora were living 
this life up there. “ How green and sweet the earth might be,” 
she thought as she trod the wide brick-walks between the stately 
buildings, “ if there need n't be these conglomerated cities and 
all this storing of things to make trade out of ! When the cir- 
culation congests anywhere in the human body it makes a w'eu 
or a tumor, I suppose. 0 dear ! we are so proud of our con- 
gestions on this bewildered little planet ! ” 


NINE FROM NOUGHT, AND FELLAIDEN NEWS. 467 

“ I wonder if there are n’t a good many things we don’t ‘ owe ’ 
to do that we undertake to do, and if so the things we do owe 
to do don’t get left undone 1 ” she resumed with herself, with 
certainly a very nimble play upon the verb “ to do.” And she 
came to the partial conclusion that “ dictionary-Bible ” did really 
throw a wonderful deal of light. 

Only, after all, she could n’t see which way to go.- Taking 
the whole city of Boston on her hands was n’t going to settle 
any single little own “ ought ” of hers. 

There was still her individual, restless life — Frances Ever- 
idge’s — behind it all. Something in which, could she hear it 
rightly, there must be the individual summons and placing. 
“ Come hither, my child ! Sit here — stand here — and do this 
little work — all thine — for Me ! ” She did so long for a “ cor- 
ner.” She thought she might be made for some small place, 
but not for these manifold great things. She knew the trouble 
was that she had attacked them in bulk ; she had not come to 
them in the gradual order of her living, by the leading from 
inch to inch. She was trying, because one fair stone she might 
nave laid in the Building had dropped from her grasp, to lift up 
the whole side of the Pyramid. 

The call came to her for just a present time, as it does come 
often through the very working of our laborious self-perplexities 
to cut the knot of them, to lie down and to endure. France 
was taken ill. 

It was a nervous feverishness settling itself upon a cold, and 
threatening to drop those modifying syllables and take the form 
of asserted malady. She was good for nothing, she said at first ; 
then prohibitions were laid upon her ; then there was nothing 
to do but to be good for nothing, and it was the hardest thing 
she had tried yet. 

It came about, though, that it made things possible for saying 
and doing, without which — yet who shall say without what 
anything might not have happened % 

For one thing, and the chief thing, France had plenty of 
time to think. There was no use in being in a huiTy to 
do. She settled a good deal with herself carefully, and in no 
huiry, in these days. And presently she found something 


468 ODD, OR EVEN ? 

very distinct to do in regard to these things that she was 
settling. 

Also, she seemed to get Miss Ammah back again out of that 
restraint and aloofness. The good woman came often to her, 
and came close. The young girl was grown very dear to her 
heart and to her oldening life. 

France, found out, too, that her mother was getting worn. 
The long-continued youthfulness of her appearance had become 
encroached upon and changed with this winter of the city, of 
multiplied interruptions and fatigues, of faster unfolding plans 
and cares. “If mamma and the children only could be got 
away to a place like Fellaiden this year!” she thought. “I 
wonder — ” and a bright idea seized her. But she could hardly 
be so bold, in any way, as to approach it just now in her com- 
munications with Miss Ammah. The “ children,” Hortense and 
Cornelia, who have not had more place in this story simply be- 
cause, for one thing, France’s home-life has had so little place 
in it, and again, because they two had heretofore so paired off 
together in their school-going and their associations with their 
fellows, as the two elders had done in their advanced social life, 
leaving our France for us to take up, since, as she told us herself 
at the beginning, she was rather skipped in the family, — these 
young girls found their way to France now that she was station- 
ary, and began to discover that she was “ a good deal jollier than 
they knew.” On her part, she learned something of what she 
might have to do right here “ in the middle,” between what had 
grown up and could not be helped and what was growing up and 
ought to be helped a great deal. She began to recognize that, 
merely as a kind of moral breakwater, it might not be in vain and 
might not have been accidental that she, the odd one, had been 
so set in the midst. 

Mr. Everidge substituted a half-hour in France’s room every 
day for that second occasional cigar. He learned a good deal 
of her, really, without her knowing it. For one thing, that 
book of the Great Pyramid — of which you, reader, are perhaps 
a little tired, but through which such wonderful ideas had come 
to France — lay on her book-table as she was slowly getting 
better and was allowed more freedom in occupation. She and 


NINE FBOM NOUGHT, AND FELLAIDEN NEWS. 469 

her father came to talking of it. -There were absolute verities 
of life presented there that were tangible, inevasible ; founded 
upon nothing that could be set aside as a myth, a theory, but 
fixed in the visible laws of things. 

Mr. Everidge was greatly interested, though when theory 
followed fact he was far from ready to go on with it to all its 
conclusions. But he was surprised to find his little Fran’ had 
managed to get hold of such things. 

One day, — I must make rapid points now, for I have told 
my simple story all too leisurely, unless you grant that the real 
story is in the slow and gradual things, — Miss Ammah came 
m with a pocketful of letters and a face full of news. She kept 
the letters in her pocket for a while, but she could not keep the 
budget out of her face. 

“ You look brimful. Miss Ammah,” said France. “ What 
has been happening, or is going to 1 ” 

“ Some things that are brimful choke up with it, and pour 
slowly. I ’m a long-necked bottle, France. Give me time.” 

“ ‘ All the time there is,’ ” said France. “ But remember it 
will be time for me to fancy everything conceivable.” 

And some eagerness, as ill-repressed in the girl’s eyes as her 
own fulness in hers, admonished Miss Tredgold. 

“ I won’t worry you. But, for one thing, I ’m going up to 
Fellaiden to see the spring come out there, if I can’t have the 
summer, and to furnish my house.” 

“0 Miss Ammah !” France lifted herself up on her elbow 
upon the low couch where she rested. “Take me with you. 
Miss Ammah ! ” 

“ Well, that is outright. I like that. I ’ve been waiting 
for that, — or something. I did n’t dare, — but why, France 1 ” 

“ 0, I want the country so ! Papa is fidgety to get me out 
to the Place, but mamma has been so snarled up with engage- 
ments that she couldn’t get rid of, and she is so tired, too,' 
herself. And Fellaiden would be so much better ! ” 

“ Why, France 1 ” persisted conscience-quickened Miss Ammah, 
who meant to know what she was about this time. “ I don’t 
mean what for, — you need n’t say anything you don’t want to, 
— but—” 


470 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 

France helped her out. This gleam of possibility restored to 
her her old sprightly quickness. 

“Just generally why 1 I ’ll tell you, Miss Ammah. I want 
to see how the spring does come up there. I want to see how 
the water comes down from Lodore when all the brooks are full. 
And I want to see, with my own eyes, other things. Because 
I had a piece of my life there last summer, you good, dear 
woman ! ” And France laid the arm she was not leaning on 
right across Miss Ammah’s knees, and looked up in her face with 
pure, unafraid eyes. 

“ I like that,” repeated Miss Ammah, putting her hand softly 
on France’s sleeve, and with more yet in her face than she wot 
of from her heart. “ But — I can’t say, France. I must have 
leave all round. And now I ’ve got news to tell you from Fel- 
laiden.” 

A little blench flittered across those gentle-dauntless eyes. 
France took her arm off Miss Ammah’s knees, and leaned back 
again. What news could it be 1 

“And I have a letter for you from Israel Heybrook. He 
says he wanted to tell you the news himself, you had been so 
his friend.” 

Miss Ammah was probing. It seemed cruel to herself, but 
as a responsible woman she must do it now. 

Every vestige of color went out of France’s sweet, upturned 
face, as it had done that day when Miss Ammah had told her 
at the Berkeley about going off this year to Europe. 

There was no need of probing any more. She had found the 
ball. 

Miss Ammah took a handful of lettei’s from her pocket and 
gave France one. 

“You are tired,” she said. “ I sha’u’t talk to you any more 
now. I ’ll come again to-morrow, and we ’ll see about Fellaiden. 
But I shall give you your claret before I go.” 

Miss Ammah turned to a pretty little bedroom buffet, and 
poured out some wine and water, sugared it delicately, and 
bi*ought it over to the sofa. “You must get stronger if you’re 
logo up the hills,” she said. 

France smiled a pitiful little smile. “ Yes, perhaps I must,’* 


NINE FROM NOUGHT, AND FEJ.LAIDEN NEWS. 471 

she said. All the sudden buoyancy had dropped away from 
her. But she took the wine. 

And then Miss Ammah went, — rather in a hniry. She 
pulled her pocket-handkerchief out the minute she had shut 
the door behind her, and I think, if the truth were told, she 
wiped first one eye and then the other all the way down 
stairs. 

France took up the letter. Her name stood in fine, strong 
script upon the back, — her name, in Israel Heybrook’s hand- 
writing. 

The letter was not sealed. Had Miss Ammah read it, then 1 
Had he meant she should ? It could be very little, especially, 
after all, to herself, then. Or — but of course, there could be 
nothing in it that could make it much — so much that — 
What folly of nonsense was she thinking? 

There could be but one piece of news, she supposed, that Rael 
would write about so signally. And she had at any rate to 
read the letter. 

It could be no worse after than now. Worse ? Had she not 
to be glad for Rael ? Was she not his friend, — promised 
for “ always ” ? 

So she drew out the little sheet from the envelope. She 
remembered, as she did so, how she had received and treated 
that one note that Mr. Kingsworth had written her. A com- 
punction that she had not then been capable of smote through 
her. Oh, she hoped good Mr, Kingsworth was quite happy now ! 
And she wondered — all in the minute in which she slowly 
opened the two folds of the letter — how people, after such 
things, attained to be. 

And this was what she read : — 

“ Dear Miss France, — I should not have troubled you with 
any little thing about myself, though I have never forgotten 
that you said you would be my friend, and that you listened so 
kindly to all my plans, and that which I had to think about 
when you were here. But something has happened to me — to 
us all — now, which makes me feel that I can take the liberty 
of writing ; that it belongs to you to hear from me what so hap- 
pily concerns us. 


472 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


“Miss Ammah will have told you — ” 

France stopped here in her reading, partly puzzled, partly 
shrinking to go further. 

Miss Ammah had told her nothing ; and something had hap- 
pened to them all. 

Well, would it not be to all, — this happiness, that she knew 
she was afraid was the happening to Rael 1 She was resolutely 
blind to each succeeding line ; she would not glance over this 
letter. It should come to her as it must, and it had all got to 
be read j so she lifted it up again. 

“Miss Ammah will have told you that my uncle. Deacon 
Ambrose Newell, died ten days ago. He was only sick a week. 
Miss France, I will never blame any one, I think, again. I have 
been despising poor Uncle Amb all my life, and now the noble- 
ness has got free in him at the very end, and he has done every- 
thing that he should do by us. And I could n’t forgive Sarell 
for making her wedding gowns and leaving my mother as she 
did, when it turns out she took that time for it that she might 
keep Hollis on at the Hollow, and be there herself to do just 
what she has done, — save my old uncle’s soul, and bring back 
our rights to us. It is all her doing — I mean, that it was in 
time; for Uncle Amb had it in his heart always, only Icept put 
away, as he kept everything. 

“ To tell you the whole story, you will be glad to know that 
we are richer by full ten thousand dollars. Of course, we don’t 
mean to take anything from the widow from the sale of stock, 
&c. 

“ And now. Miss France, I can choose. And I want to tell 
you that my choice is just the same, and for the same reasons, 
that it was the day I told you all about it on Crowned Head. I 
see a life here that I think I can live, and that there are not 
many people to live. Perhaps it never has been tried just as I 
mean to try it. I mean to get, and grow into, as fast, as I can, 
the very best that books and thinking, which are the ways of 
the going of truth through the world, can give me ; and I 
mean to put it all into every particular of this simple everyday 
doiug up here, at the first sources of things that meu work for, 
— daily bread. I think it may be the honestest, grandest life a 


NINE FIIOM NOUGHT, AND FELLAIDEN NEWS. 473 

man can live, and help show others how to live. And Mr. 
Kingsworth thinks so too. 

“ This is all my news ; if you still care for it, it is reason 
enough for ray letter. I have no right to tell you any more of 
myself ; but I will say that there is nothing in me that has not 
been made better — yes, and happier — because I have known 
such as you. 

“ I am very thankfully and truly your friend, 

“Israel Welcome Heybrook.” 

“ Such as.” How much did those two words mean 1 In them 
lay all the possibility of a sting to P'rance in this manly letter 
that she was proud of, and of course she stung herself with 
them. 

If she had only known how determined an effort it had cost 
him to put them in ! 


474 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


CHAPTER XLVI. 

“ THOSE DOZEN YEARS OF OURS,” 

The next day was Saturday, — the home day. Miss Ammah 
came to early dinner, and invited herself afterward into Mr. 
Everidge’s smoking-room. Miss Ammah made her own oppor- 
tunities. “I want to talk to you, George,” she said. And 
when they were cosily seated, — the one with match-box and 
ash-tray beside him, and the twisted leaf in his mouth, which he 
began to spiritualize into white wreaths and rings of cloudy fra- 
grance, and the other with a knitting-basket of softly dropped, 
snowy wool, which was being frothed up by the play of her 
needles with its cobweb thread into something almost as vapory, 
— she began. 

The window was wide open to-day, and the room was full of 
broad, long, afternoon sunlight. 

“You’ll get out of town next week, then.” It had been said 
so at the dinner-table, France had been there, but she had 
gone back to the quiet of her own room again. 

“Yes. It’s high time. High time for everybody else, as 
well as for poor Fran’. How is the child coming on, do you 
think?” 

“ Better. She only wants a change.” 

“ Yes, She has her long drive out of town every day now ; 
but that is not enough. She must ride out, and not come back 
again.” 

“ What I think is, that it would be good for her to go off and 
not come back again till you are all settled. The bustle and 
upset will be just what she can’t bear.” 

“ I know, But I don’t know of any way that it could be 
managed.” 


“THOSE DOZEN YEARS OF OURS.” 475 

“ I do. I never say ‘ ought/ if I can help it, without know- 
ing where the ‘ can ’ is.” 

“ Of course not. You ’re the canniest person I ever met with. 
Very well.” 

“ I ’ni going up to Fellaiden next week. The paper-hanger 
and the carpet-man have just come down, and a car-load of fur- 
niture has just gone up. I ’m going to straighten my house, to 
come back to in September. Fran’ could be quiet, out of all 
my turmoil, at the farmhouse. Of course, I should be there, 
too, until — in a few days, I guess — I could warm up, and she 
could come to me. Would you let her go 1 ” 

“ If what 1 ” 

“ If I asked her. It ’s fair to say that she has asked me, 
already. What I want is leave to ask her.” 

“ You mean something, Ammah. What made her ask you 1 ” 

“That’s just what I won’t be responsible for. I don’t want 
you to trust her to me. If you like Fellaiden for her, I ’ll take 
her, and be thankful to. That ’s all.” 

The corners of Mr. Everidge’s lips and eyebrows dropped just 
a little. I think a man always resents the first notion that his 
daughter can care for any man. 

“ If you mean that young preacher,” he said, with a slight 
protesting effort, “ Fran’ is n’t the girl to — ” 

“ Run after anybody. I know that,” said Miss Ammah, 
quickly. “ But she ’s just the girl to give herself no peace till 
she finds out the truth of things, and whether she ’s been mak- 
ing a mistake — that would be more than a mistake for one.” 

“ You think she has made a mistake 1 ” 

“ I ’m pretty sure of it. But — now don’t jump at me, 
George Everidge, or tip anything over. I don’i think it ’s about 
the minister.” 

Mr. Everidge did not tip over anything ; but he tipped the 
wrong end of his cigar against the ash-tray, and came very near 
putting the other, not the right one, into his mouth. It was 
on the way there, apparently, but hindered by the impossibility 
to him of resuming his smoke till this startling woman had been 
more explicit. He got so far, intending to be quite cool and 
unapprehensive, while he looked at his companion for an an- 


476 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


swer to his immediate, and not altogether calm “What on 
earth, then 1 Who 1 I don’t understand you, Ammah ! ” 
“Understanding is just about the last thing people do do,” 
returned Miss Ammah. “ If we could do that, there would n’t 
be any need of going through the world at all. But to make 
anybody else understand, — no, I don’t really expect to. Only 
just, — if you’d wait till you do, and then make up your own 
mind, for I don’t want to be trusted ! ” 

“ I don’t believe you ’d better be ! How am I to come at 
anything, if there ’s anything to come at 1 ” interjected Mr. 
Everidge, with an impatience impatient at itself. 

“ Turn your cigar round, George,” admonished Miss Ammah. 
“ France got a letter from Fellaiden, yesterday. I don’t know 
a word that ’s in it ; but I ’ll venture to say she ’ll show it to 
you if you ask her, and that there ’ll be something in it that ’ll 
say for itself. But it was before the letter that she asked me. 
And one thing — children come to a time when they ’ve their 
lives to live for themselves ; w'e are apt to forget that, and 
France — yes, I think she is a grown woman, now ; which half 
the girls are n’t, and never come to.” 

There. was a letter of France’s own, which Mr. Everidge recol- 
lected at these words, lying close under his elbow in a drawer in 
his writing-table, — a letter which, when his wife had shown it 
to him, one day last summer, he had taken from her and had 
put aw'ay to keep ; in the same drawer was a little pair of shoes 
that France had first run alone in : they belonged together, he 
thought. Men do lay by things like that, though they are not 
commonly credited with such sentiment. 

Yes, he remembered very well that France had been peculiar 
in her running alone. She had not blundered and tumbled into 
it ; she had quietly made up her mind one day that it was time, 
and she had picked herself up and done it. It was for that he 
had put the little shoes away. Now — well, perhaps she did 
see that it was time for her to run alone again. Only, he would 
stand by if he could, and take care there should be nothing 
too dangerous in her way. 

“ I’ll go up and see Fran’,” he said, dropping his cigar, that 
had lost its relish, into the scrap-jar, 


“THOSE DOZEN YEARS OF OURS.” 477 

“ Do ; and I ’ll wait here,” answered Miss Ammah. 

“ I don’t know that I shall say anything, or that she will,” 
said Mr. Everidge. There is one half of the human creation, 
and there may be just another quarter, perhaps, out of the other 
half, which does n’t like to seem to do anything exactly as it is 
advised. 

But Miss Ammah waited. “ They both will ; and now I can 
have a clear mind,” 

“So you think you want to go up to Fellaidenl” Mr. Ever- 
idge asked his daughter, a little suddenly, and perhaps on pur- 
pose, when he had sat by her, speaking of things indifferent, for 
about five minutes. 

“ I want to go very much, papa,” France answered him, with 
that still, brave look in her eyes. 

“ Do you think you are able 1 ” the question was a slight re- 
treat on his part. 

“ I think it is the thing for me to do. It is a right way and 
time. It will make me able.” 

That word “ able ” reminded him again. Here was this child 
of his, with a life before her that she herself had to be able for, 
not he for her. 

“ You have heard from your friends up there. Miss Ammah 
tells me 1 ” 

“Yes. But if I had not heard I should have liked to go. They 
have had some good fortune, papa. I should like to tell them 
now how glad I am.” 

“ You could write that.” 

“ Yes, but I want to see how glad they are. I want to see 
some other things. I got into their story, last summer, papa.” 

“Fran’, has it anything to do with those dozen years of 
mine 1 ” 

A swift blush ran up into her face. But she looked brave, 
in all sweet modesty, still ; and she caught up her weapons. 

“ How can I tell what anything might have to do with those 
dozen years of ours, papa 1 But not that, not a bit,” she said ; 
and for the first moment it occurred to her that she could n’t 
go to Fellaiden without some touching, by her very presence, 
of that other chapter of the story. 


478 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


“Only, what we all want is the very truth,” her own coura- 
geous purpose enabled her to answer for Bernard Kingsworth. 
She was going for the truth, and to be true. Nobody need be 
afraid of that. 

While she thought of it so, her father was thinking of “ those 
dozen years of ours.” Would they be “ ours ” if he were a separ- 
ating power between France and anything that might actually 
belong to her in those j’^ears ? And might n’t they be theirs to- 
gether, whatever they might bring, if it could only be received 
— but how could it if it were this, the only thing that he could 
think of? 

It was not strange that Mr. Everidge revolted at this but- 
half-understood possibility. The remarkable thing thus far was 
that he could tolerate for an instant the consideration of such 
a possibility at all. Nothing but the sort of girl that he saw in 
every line and look, and heard in every word and tone, his 
France to be, could have held his absolute counter-dictation in 
suspense before it. Nothing but that, although his estimate 
of Miss Tredgold was such that, whether she would be trusted 
or not, he would always think twice before he ran blindly 
against anything that she had even remotely furthered. 

Nothing but that, although it was no thanks to him, he felt, 
that it had come to be so with his Fran’. He only realized, as 
we do when we have brought all our children up, that by that 
time there is either little use or little need of interference. 

“ Papa, I should like to have you see this letter.” France 
held it out to him from her little work-basket. 

Mr. Everidge, but for this act of hers, would have been hard 
bestead how next or further to proceed. When she had said, 
“ Not that, not a bit,” to interrogate, “ What was it, then ? ” and 
to ask for what somebody up there had written to her, — I think 
Mr. Everidge would have left the room and gone down and 
trusted Miss Aramah by force with the whole affair, before he 
would have done that. 

But here was his Fran’ again ! Truly, between two right- 
minded persons, neither has ever to do the whole of a right 
thing. 

He took it, and read it through. He had not forgotten 


“THOSE DOZEN YEARS OF OURS. 


479 




Israel Heybrook, the young man who had said it was “ hard to 
shoot over a man’s head, if you once got it lifted up,” and that 
“a man’s measure, in some things, is made to be about the 
same.” 

Every word of this letter was the word of a man whose head 
had got lifted up ; every word was according to the measure of 
such a man. There was nothing mean or unformed in the very 
handwriting. 

Miss Ammah had done well to venture to say, without hav- 
ing read a syllable of it, that a letter from such a man would 
speak for itself. And how well she must have known him, too, 
and this measure of him, to be sure of that ! Mr. Everidge 
thought of what he had consented to, — of little Sampson Kay- 
nard, who was his son-in-law. 

When he placed the sheet in the envelope again, and gave it 
back to his daughter, he said, — and insensibly he took the 
tone of dealing now as with any possible, credible thing, — “I 
should like just to ask, — has Mr. Heybrook ever spoken to you 
of anything more than friendship 1 ” 

The color was high again, but the eyes were steady and the 
voice was clear. “No, never, papa. He has only spoken so of 
my being his friend as if — But I will tell you, papa. I have 
not a thought in my mind that I would not be glad you should 
see, if you could see it without any telling at all. He would 
not have said such a thing then. He would not have thought 
it was right ; and I don’t know as he would ever. It is n’t that 
part of it, papa. I wish I could make you see, because he may 
be going to say it to quite another person now ; but I did this : 
I made him feel, feeling it myself, that there was a great dif- 
ference between tis ; and so there is,” she said, with a sudden 
superb humility, “and I want — just once — to let him see that 
the difference is up, and not down, from me, and that I know it. 

I 'm very proud, papa ; you need n’t think I would n’t be ; but 
I ’m too proud to let that slight stay, — there. And I want 
things, whatever they are, to be true. People do stand so mean 
and helpless sometimes, and let them slip away into untrueness.” 

George Everidge, getting up to go, stood there wondering 
inwardly, how it had happened to him, with his careless train- 


480 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


ing, to find, where he had but had a little child beside him, run- 
ning alone, all at once a grand girl like this coming to him, frank 
and daughterly, with what was in her heart, as if he had been 
grand altogether, too. “ I stand for it to her,” was his solution 
to himself afterward, “ She is a perfect ckild^ and takes a per- 
fect father for granted.” 

Verily, there are many things in which we can only repre- 
sent that which was thought of for us when we were made in 
the image of the Heavenly ! 

All Mr. Everidge did, just then and there, was to kiss France, 
and tell her she was a good girl. 

Downstairs, after sitting half an hour with Miss Tredgold 
and a newspaper, without the least civility of attention to 
either, he said to the lady, “ 1 ’ll take her off your hands, 
Ammah. I ’ll trust herself. But I ’m doing the most extraor- 
dinary things lately ! Do you think I am quite fit to be kept 
out of Somerville 1 ” 

Perhaps France, in her capacity for nobleness, and also in 
her occasionally odd style of giving way to it, was not alto- 
gether so unaccountable, as her father’s child. 


CHIMES. 


481 


CHAPTER XLVII. 

CHIMES. 

' It is Sunday again, the Day of Light. Shall we skip the 
Sun Day 1 

It is Easter Sunday, the Day of the Light of Life ; of the 
coming of the glory of the Lord by the way of the East. Shall 
we skip the Easter Sun Day 1 

Of all the pauses which the recurring rest makes in our com- 
mon living and action, the sweetest, I think, is when it comes 
between a plan or decision of a doing that we greatly desire 
and that is good for us, and the doing itself, or between the good 
news of something and the fulfilling of the news. It is a rest of 
certainty and anticipation, in which the thought and hope come 
gladly again and again to us. It is a rest we should not take 
for ourselves in our eagerness, but of which we find the tender- 
ness of the providing. 

This was such a day to Frances Everidge. 

She was to go in three days more, in this lovely early spring- 
time, in a quite right and natural way, and with her whole body 
and spirit craving together the rightness and the help of it, — 
to Fellaiden among the hills. 

That it was open to her, that there was nothing between 
her and it forbidding her to go, — as her very consciousness of 
need seemed forbidding her when her one link and chance had 
been about to be removed, and the great, whole year to be 
growing on, as other years, maybe, would follow and grow, be- 
tween her and that piece of her life that she would only have 
lived as a fragment, to be broken quite off and cast away, — 
this was a great lifting. 

It was a showing to her that nothing is cast away and done 
with, that the lines and colors once let in reappear in the pattern 


482 


ODD, OK EVEN ? 

and make it out; that life is oot a “crazy wrap,” made of odds 
and ends, some of which God has no more left of. The bright, 
soft rug, in which even the odds and ends were managed with a 
method, that she drew up over her feet upon the sofa where 
she settled herself with her books, made her think of this. 

Everything made her think of everything hopeful. One 
thing was sure : she was going to know the truth, and the 
truth would make her free. Nothing would be slipping away 
from her, or from anybody, for want of knowing ; then slie 
thought she could have courage to live her life on, because she 
would be certain that it was her life. 

She had brought down with her the two books that she was 
most interested just now to think into, — her Bible, and the 
Prayer Book that she had not been brought up by, but which 
she had come to use of late through mere circumstance to 
follow the worship in the church she had been attending. She 
was discovering meanings in it that have been perhaps much 
covered up in the church by the very ritual of them, and 
which by rediscovery are so freshly beautiful. She was reading 
it as she had read that other book about the wonder in stone. 
Here w'as a wonder of some life that had been in the world, 
grown from the beginning of the New Testament, and the 
heart of which, whatever the superpositions might be, was the 
heart and secret of that. 

She wondered if the little children would sing “ 0 all ye 
works of the Lord,” to-day. 

Her father looked in just before he went out with his wife to 
the morning service. “So you are here, little Fran"? Morris 
is in. Ring, if you want anything. Is that conservatory win- 
dow too much for you 1 ” 

“ Not a bit, papa ; everything is east to-day but the wind.” 

Mr. Everidge glanced at the book in her hand. “You are 
getting to be quite a little churchwoman,” he said ; and it did 
not sound exactly as a careless, passing remark. 

“ I don’t know, papa. I don’t know very much about the 
church. But there are things that I am glad have been left in 
the world till I could find them. I think some great thing — 
that ought to take us all in — must have been keeping in the 
midst of the churches, somew'here,'! ” 


CHIMES. 483 

The King’s Chamber, sealed up in the heart of the Build- 
ing. 

Mr. Everidge stooped down and kissed her. “ If you find 
your way into it, hold up your torch for me. Don’t vanish in, 
away from me ! ” and still his word, that wore a playfulness, 
was not just playful. And then France was left alone. 

The wind came in softly from the south over the heads of 
the blossoms. On it floated the Easter chimes, — Easter chimes 
and Easter incense. The churches would be full of flowers and 
fragrance to-day. 

The bells played Coronation. The slow, sweet strokes rang 
forth the melody, drop by drop. 

“ Bring forth the royal diadem, and crown him Lord of all ! ” 

The memory of the words drifted in with the joyous notes. 

Crow’iied King. He who had come Conqueror out of the land 
of the enemy ; His garments dyed red with the wounds of 
battle ; King of the whole earth : did not the triumphant 
Easter peal say that ? 

Was not that the w’hole of itl Jesus of Nazareth, King of 
the Jews. And the Jews were the Hebrew people, the people 
who had come forth from beyond the Euphrates, the people 
who should fill up the real Jerusalem. 

“ Israel : ” the Priests and the Servants, and the Spirits and 
Souls of all the Righteous; the holy and humble Men of 
Heart. What a beautiful name-word that I^ael was ! she was 
glad to think that her friend, being what he was, should bear it. 

And so her thoughts came round to, as they kept hovering 
toward, Fellaiden among the hills. 

This work here, that she had just begun upon % These poor 
ones, whose hills were difficulties, who could get away to no 
Fellaiden 1 She had not forgotten them. She was not tired of 
them. But what she was really to do about them, — was there 
nothing that should tell her that, more rightly than the mere 
impulse to escape from her own tangle by an impetuous pull at 
the grand snarl of the world 1 The King of the world, would 
He not tell her that 1 She had brought His words down here 
to-day to see. 


V- 


484 


ODD, OR EyEN ? 


The words, alive, came forth to meet her. Before she •, died, 
the answer, as it does out of that word, planted in us insensibly 
since this world has become Christendom, began to utter itself. 

There was a story there. The story of a man who, as he 
journeyed, — .4s he journeyed ! was the King careful to say it 
so 1 

In the way of each of us, as we go, the errand lies, then 1 
Does the King order that also 1 

In all the crisscross of the world, if everybody found his way 
by that leading and sending, if every man “ stood in his place,” 
would the service be prepared 1 

Was there not something about the mote and the beam that 
might be true, in some way, of that 1 Can we begin to struggle 
with everything that is a hindrance and out of place, can we set 
every least thing, the crowd and mass of least things, straight, 
when we ourselves are not where we were meant to be ; are not 
straight with the sun 1 Must we “ orient ” our own life first 1 
not get everything as we want it, — oh no ! but everything, as it 
comes, according to that which is most real and true 1 Then, in 
the door of our tent, will the angels of opportunity appear 1 and 
will the pillar of the Lord stand before our sight, and His “ pres- 
ence go with us, and give us rest” 1 

Is it that the kingdom of heaven cannot, after all, be taken 
by violence ; but must it come, first, in some still, sweet, sun- 
shiny way] 

This was the Easter sermon that Something, — the winds of 
God, — preached tenderly to God’s child, that springtide day. 

And an errand which she was straightway to do came to her 
to be done. 

Philip Merriweather walked round from church to call and 
see her. Miss Tredgold had told him that she was going away 
with her. 

“ How sweet you are ! ” he exclaimed, coming in among the 
breath of the flowers, in the warm light and the gently stirring 
air. 

France laughed. “ It is sweet to be sweetly surrounded,” 
she said. 

“ Some people surround themselves,” said the boy. “ So 


CHIMES. 485 

you ’re going up to Fellaiden 1 There ’ll be sweetness there, 
again ! ” 

“ Yes. The springtime is everywhere, now, Phil. They say 
the early weather has really come for good. And how lovely it 
will be, among the brooks and the young grass, and the moun- 
tain-tops turning soft again ! ” 

A longing look came into the face of the boy of the moun- 
tains. “Think of old Thumble,” he said. “You don’t know 
how he does look in the 'springtime. Miss France ! With 
just that little gray cloud of the live-looking trees, before they 
actually bud out, feathering up along his sides ! and how the 
water sings away underneath ! It ’s like the Chant ; and then, 
too, — oh, I did n’t half know what, or who was there, when I 
was ! ” he broke off, with a splendid ambiguity that was uncon- 
sciously quite worthy of his Fellaiden days. But France did 
not take that up. 

“ Men of heart,” she said quietly. “ Yes, there are those 
there, too.” 

“ There is one fool less there, now, at any rate,” said Phil, 
lashing himself. 

“ Perhaps, if any little foolishness has seen its folly, thei’e is 
one less in the world,” said France. “And one more of the 
others possible to be.” 

“ Don’t set me up. Keep on setting me down ; it ’s better 
for me,” said Phil. “Think of how I undertook to bleat up in 
that man’s face, and thought I was roaring; and yet, I don’t 
know much better about it all, now. I just know that I don’t 
know.” 

He took up the little Bible, probably quite mechanically, that 
lay there by his hand. 

“ We just know Who does know,” said France, full, without 
thinking about being so, of the message that had been breathed 
into her. 

“You’re further than I am,” said the boy. “How do we 
know that 1 That ’s the corner we ’re driven into.” 

“ Because there it is,” said the girl. “ In your own hands.” 

“ Jtl of this! Whales and alll I’m not cavilling now. 
But what parti how much of it do you /eel sure of? Not 


486 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


believe ; because people believe lots that they’re not sure of. I 
honestly want to know.” 

“ I feel sure of every word the Person whose story is in the 
short half of that Book has said.” 

“ You ’ve got to believe about Him, first,” said Philip. 

“ I believe every word He says about Himself,” said France. 

“ But that ’s the circle of it. What if He never was at all 1 
I ’m not scoffing.” , 

“ I know you ’re not.” 

“ But they say, you know, that it might have been all 
imagined, as the best sort of thing to bel ” The question of his 
tone was a great deal more in earnest than the assertion of his 
words. 

“ It would have taken,” France answered slowly, as if some- 
thing she was bound to say, “a Jesus Christ to invent a Jesus 
Christ. So, by that story being there. He is proved to be 
somewhere, is n’t He 1 ” 

“ But then, — suppose, — He might have been mistaken, or 
misreported, in some things! Those were queer, ignorant 
times, — the times of that story.” 

These are queer, ignorant times,” said France, “only with 
bigger things to be ignorant about. We want just what they 
wanted then, to understand with. And the understanding was 
all He said anything about. And Phil, God would n’t have let 
a lie or a mistake about the way of that understanding live so 
long — as the very best thing — in the world. You ’ve got to 
give it all up, if you give up this. Besides, when the daylight 
comes, you don’t have to argue about it, by the clock and by 
dead-reckoning. You see it.” 

“ I see you see. So perhaps I shall, as we both have human 
eyes.” 

“ That's a good deal to see,” said France, smiling. “I sup- 
pose that is what has really come down all the way from the 
Apostles.” 

“Miss France, I must go off, now. No, I sha’n’t stay to 
lunch, to-day. I only came in for a minute, to say good-by, 
and I want you to give a message for me up in Fellaiden.” 

“ Of course I will,” said France. 


CHIJMES. 


487 


“ I want you to beg pardon, for me, of Mr. Kingsworth,” said 
Phil Men-iweather, manly-fashion. “And tell him a little of 
the fool is getting shaken out of me.” 

France sat up and held out her hand. “ You are not Flip 
any longer,” she said. 

“ You can’t make any very grand kind of Old Testament re- 
christening for me,” said Phil, laughing. “ ‘ Philip ’ is nothing 
but ‘ a lover of horses,’ after all.” 

“ A lover of things strong and noble, that help us bear our 
burdens and take us where we could n’t go of ourselves,” said 
France. “Philip is all that, then.” 

“If I ever do drive a full team,” said Phil, — “but I hate 
making speeches ! ” And without any further speech at all, only 
with a great grasp of her hand, he went away. 

As he went out he met the two young girls, Hortense and 
Cornelia. “Is France in the evening-room]” they asked, and 
hurried in to tell their sister all about the Easter flowers, — and 
perhaps, too, not a little about the Easter bonnets, 

They were a good deal with France in these days ; so Philip 
Merri weather had come to know them more of late, in ways 
that I have not had space to tell you of ; curiously happening, 
since they were really so much nearer his age and tone, one 
would say, than she. 

“How like Hortense is growing to Miss France, — or after 
her ! ” Phil thought as he went down stairs. “ We need n’t any 
of us think to catch up with her ; we have n’t started soon 
enough ! ” 


488 


ODD, OE EVEN? 


CHAPTER XL VIII. 

OUTSIDE, WITH A DAKK LANTEKN. 

France had written back to Israel : — 

“ I thank you very much, dear Mr. Israel, for writing me 
your hews yourself. You say about it just what I should have 
expected. I should have known you would not change your 
mind, for that was made up on grounds and reasons quite differ- 
ent from what money has to do with. But I am so glad you 
have also got the money ! 

“ I have not been quite well lately. After Fellaiden, the city 
has not been very good for me, — or to me, some way. Miss 
Ammah is coming up to her house, and they are going to let 
me come with her, if she gets leave from your mother. For 
I suppose we should have to trouble her a little. They are 
sending me for Fellaiden air ; but what I am coming for is to see 
Fellaiden friends, and to be glad with them. 

“ I am very sincerely yours, 

“Frances Everidge.” 

That was her defence, — that bold front of purpose, shunning 
nothing. She was coming becaiise she wanted to come back 
among her friends, and be part with them in the new things ■, 
not content to belong only to the past, the old, — though it was 
the past and the old of only last year. 

Perhaps it was just a little puzzling to Israel, whether he 
should comfort or torment himself with these words. The 
words were sweetly gracious; but the graciousness of saying 
theml Would he not rather that it should have been less 
frankly possible 1 

If he, in his turn, could have understood just how strong a 


OUTSIDE, WITH A DARK LANTERN. 489 

motive for hiding herself had forced her to putting the frank- 
ness in ! 

Miss Ammah had gone straight home on the Friday, — not 
waiting for the Saturday’s peradventure of decision, — and writ- 
ten to Mother Hey brook, asking if she might bring France 
Everidge with her, if she could get her % So France knew that 
the Monday would bring the reply. But if anybody had ever 
waited to be happy until made sure that Mother Heybrook 
would not forbid it, it would have been a holding of breath for 
fear of the free air giving out. 

Wednesday was the sweetest of April days, — the sweetest, at 
any rate, there had been yet this year. Lyman' met them at 
Creddle’s Mills, with the light open wagon. Two chair-backs, 
— comfortable old curves, — sawed from the lower frames and 
set in staples, with thick rugs thrown over them, had been 
added to the back seat ; these made*the vehicle perfect. Farmer- 
folk do not wait to get new equipages, any more than to build 
new houses ; they add and incorporate new comforts with the 
old, in homely, clever ways. All the open wagon had ever 
wanted it had now ; it was a luxurious turnout. 

“ Beautif’l. weather — overhead ! ” somebody called to Lyman 
in highway greeting, as they came out from the town streets of 
the Mills, and took the long, straight north road under the hill- 
foot. 

“Yes, only there ain’t many of us travellin’ that way, ex- 
actly ! ” responded Lyman, as his wheels ground heavily out of 
the rut, and turned great rolls of wet brown earth aside from 
them. There had been heavy spring rains up here, he told 
them. 

But it was all overhead to France. She was travelling just 
that way. The blue sky, and the unnamable deliciousness of 
the air, and the uprising music of running waters, — she was 
aloft among them, out of all the heavy ruts, going as a bird 
goes, on its wings, not feet. 

And so they came, up the ascents, and along the windings, 
dipping down into Clark’s Hollow, skirting the Long Meadows, 
and climbing the slow stretch of Three-Mile Hill. 

And when they drove up over the soft grass sward of the wide 


'490 ODD, OR EVEN? 

door-place, there stood Rael Heybrook and his mother in the 
house-porch. 

So easy and quick it had been to get here ! so same it all was, 
waiting. Was it? two pairs of eyes.asked the swift question of 
«ach other, as Rael took France’s hands to help her down over 
the wagon-side. Asked it under cover. Neither was conscious 
that they had asked, or quite sure of what they had found. 

Israel saw that France was pale. “You are tired with your 
journey ? ” he said ; and he said it most kindly. 

“A little,’’ she answered, and the weariness was reason 
enough; but under the weariness was the question, “Why 
<;ould n’t he have driven over for us, if he cared to, — since he 
was waiting here And there was “ a little ” gentle sadness 
in the two words. 

She had not come here to be sad, though ; the next instant 
she was telling Mother Heybrook how nice she looked. “ In 
her new dress,” she said. 

“ Bless you, child, ’t is n’t new ! It ’s only rested. I pinned it 
up and laid it by last fall. It was n’t wore, but it was kind o’ 
tired. Gowns do get tired ; but then, after a spell, they shake 
out again, 's fresh ’s folks.” 

“Fow shake out fresh, Mrs. Heybrook! Some folks stay in 
strings, and their gowns too. It ’s the live bird that makes the 
live feathers,” said Miss Ammah, who always talked, the first 
day or so at Fellaiden, as if the mountain air had got a little 
bit into her head. And so the women went into the house, and 
the two young men carried the boxes up stairs, and then went 
off with the horse and w^agon into the sheds. 

It scarcely seemed as if they were beginning just where they 
left off, — even where those letters had left off. France sup- 
posed some things did not freshen up with laying by. Other 
things had been fresh and alive, meanwhile; the current had 
run into them. She had no doubt that at the Parsonage all 
was quick and circulating. Yesterday and to-day had some- 
thing to do with each other. Had she to make new yester- 
days again 1 

She was tired, — a good deal tired. She went to bed early ; 
perhaps that there might the sooner be a yesterday. 


OUTSIDE, WITH A DARK LANTERN. 491 

“ It is so good — so like you — to come up here because you 
were glad for us, Miss France ! ” 

The voice came from behind her. She was out on that old 
west piazza, in the brave morning air. She turned round, and 
gave her hand to Israel. 

“ I never can say things all at once,” he went on. “And 
you were tired last night. But you must not think I had for- 
gotten your good words.” 

“ They were very poor words. They did not say much, I 
think. How full the brook must be, Mr. Rael ! How plainly 
you can hear it rushing over the rocks down there ! Oh, how 
lovely everything is at Fellaiden ! ” 

She was up on wing again. The morning was in her heart. 

Rael had resolved within himself that he would not be a 
churl, a coward. Because this girl was set so far away from 
him that it might easily have been that they two should never 
have drifted toward each other any more, because he had 
been, within himself, “ a fool,” had let that get hold of him 
which could never be helped now, though nobody but himself 
was to blame for it, he was not going to thrust off or turn away 
from what had been freely given him, and deserved — yes, the 
least from her deserved — all that he could give in return. 

Only, it should never offend her. He could bear things. He 
Teas a man. 

Bernard Kingsworth had told him that a man might hope 
anything that he was capable of hoping. Well, he would hope 
it, then ; but not from her, now. In some heaven it might 
come true, perhaps, in heavenly fashion. But all the fashions 
of this world stood between. He would only not reject and 
overthrow what had begun for him, because it might not reach 
the utmost in a present fulfilment. He would be that far 
capable of it, that far worthy that it had begun. 

Rael even said to himself sometimes — there had been times 
and times in the few days since the coming of her letter — that 
it might be Bernard Kingsworth, in the gradual unfolding of 
his character to her understanding, that she was, half uncon- 
sciously, turning back for. He remembered that “measure” 
in which, at their very first meeting here, he had discerned 


492 ODD, OR EVEN? 

them related. “ The things that are, will come true,” he said. 

“ And I can bear it.” 

Here were two that could bear, two that stood ready for the 
everlasting right to befall, though their heaven should roll to- 
gether as a scroll. 

Why, as Miss Ammah had said, should one woman have the 
love of two such men 1 

Yet could either of them be hurt by it 1 

“ Tell me about all these things,” said France to Israel. “ I 
am behind with the story, and I want to come into it again.” 
She sat down on the long red rocker. Israel drew nearer, but he 
did not sit down ; he stood and leaned against the piazza-rail be- 
fore her, and he told her all about the things that had happened. 

“ Why, Sarell is a grand woman ! ” she said. “ I would like 
to have been Sarell — to do a thing like that ! ” 

But I am afraid my France, much as I like and believe in 
her, could not have done just what Sarell had done. Why 
should I say “afraid,” though? For her, there would have 
been something yet truer and higher ; something she could not 
have done violence to and been true or high. Sarell had 
done no violence : she had simply known what might be and 
what might not ; she had accepted her own humble lot and 
way, and had done her good work “ as she journeyed.” 

“What is she to do now ?” asked France. 

“ We have helped Hollis about hiring the East Hollow Farm ; 
the widow and her mother have been moved away, already. 
Sarell is mistress there ; and Hollis will do well.” 

“ What does Sarell say 1 ” 

“ She asks, as you did, what she is to do next. Life has be- 
come so easy to her, all of a sudden, that she scarcely knows 
how to take it. She likes books, you know. Hollis brings her 
one, every week or two, from the library at Reade, and she gets 
ours from the Centre. She used to keep one by to look at 
weekdays and read Sundays, she said. One of those first days 
when the sugaring was done, and before any busy spring work 
began, I was over there ; and Hollis had just come in with the 
‘ Lass o’ Lowrie’s.’ She looked at it, and thanked him, said 
she was real glad to get it, and laid it down without opening it. 


OUTSIDE, WITH A DARK LANTERN. 


493 


‘ I wonder what I ’d best turn to, now,’ she says, looking round 
for a ‘ chore.’ ‘ Why, that,’ said Hollis. ‘Set right down an’ 
read it.’ ‘ That ? ’ says Sarell. ‘ Right away, fust minute 1 
Why, I donuo how ! ’ That ’s the way her life looks to her, the 
‘ hindrances all dropped out.’ ‘ Don’t seem ’s ef I c’d git along 
’thout a hindrance,’ she says.” 

“ That ’s a good story ! That ’s just like Sarell ! ” and Rael 
and France both laughed out gayly. It was such a gay, sweet 
thing to be merry together ! 

“ And Lyman ? ” asked France. 

“ Lyman is studying on with Mr. Kingsworth. He has been 
with him almost all winter.” 

“ Yes, Miss Ammah told me. That ’s good.” 

“ He will keep on, as well as the farm-work will let him — 
for Lyme won’t drop the plough and hoe-handles so long as he 
lives at home — until next year ; then Mr. Kingsworth thinks he 
can stand a college examination. I must tell you that Mr. 
Kingsworth has got the better of me : he has put it to me that 
it won’t be ‘ generous ’ for me not to let him do this that he 
has begun for Lyman. And Lyman is to be his student all the 
way through. I was too proud for it, at first ; but he ended 
by making me feel too proud to be mean. It ’s easier now, 
though, that I could do it myself.” 

“ You are a great deal too proud, Mr. Israel.” 

“ I must be too proud to let that boy drive the plough off 
alone, while I stand pleasuring here,” said Rael suddenly. 

He was in his dark gray woollen shirt and working trousers, 
trim and neat, — Rael was always that, — but coarse and plain, 
ready for his ploughing ; he went off with a smile, and France 
followed him with one. 

All day, one word from each remained with either. France 
had told him he was “ too proud ” ; he had been “ pleasuring ” 
while he talked with her. 

■Well, — the evening and the morning had been the first day. 


Mr. Kingsworth drove over with his sister, Leonora. 

It was an easy way of coming again, the first time. These 


494 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


two young women ought to know each other ; and it was good 
that the visit could have a point like that. 

Now, each of these two girls had something to investigate as 
to the other. Bernard had never said a word to his sister of 
the last summer as a personal experience, but he had said a 
great deal of this France Everidge. Perhaps he had been 
teaching himself to be able to talk about her freely. However, 
Leonora had certainly conceived a strong desire to see this 
France, and to see her with her brother. On the other part, 
we know very well what the meeting was to France. 

Two women, set to gauge and comprehend each other, are 
apt to do one of two things ; possibly, between them, each of two 
things : either to comprehend and measure straight through 
and through, and thenceforward to need nothing that words 
can tell, — or to strike a false trail, and comprehend with equal 
facility something that it will take a great deal of logic, of 
word or of event, to substitute with simple truth. 

In this case, there occurred the double illustration of my 
theory. 

Leonora Kingsworth saw, like a seeress, that Miss Everidge 
was — or must have been, a very little while ago — precisely the 
person to charm and win Bernard, curate of souls, as a fair, rich, 
noble upland, never brought under plough, or sown with seed of 
purpose, but sending up its life in every growth that springs 
spontaneous where grandest harvest is possible, wins the long-, 
ing of eye and hand from the man to whose love and wisdom 
for earth-culture its possibility stands for present fact. She 
saw clearly and truly that France had been a study and 
a revelation — a quickly absorbing delight and hope, very 
likely well-nigh a life-dream and passion — to her brother. 
But she did not believe her to have been so beside him that 
she could have dwelt with him on the heights. Therefore, she 
did not believe that she would, or could, concern his whole, 
livelong life. Whether she saw already something else that 
should be, I am not so sure ; but she had known Rael long 
enough, now, not to have that first apparent incongruity to get 
over ; and if she did catch a glimpse, it would not have been a 
hard thing for her to receive the idea into her mind. 


OUTSIDE, WITH A DaRK LANTERN. 495 

France Everidge, with all her brightness, used it as a dark 
lantern, and threw all the light only on one side. 

Miss Kingsworth was beautiful, more beautiful than anybody 
she had ever seen. And Kael Heybrook so discerned and loved 
all beauty ! His eyes were upon her admiringly ; the eyes of 
everybody had to be, where she was. It would be as possible 
not to look into those lovely colors of the sunset, as they sat 
there before the play and glory of them, as not to watch 
the exquisite lights and expressions upon that exquisite face. 
And the illumination came as truly from a sun-shining that 
was below the earth-surface. 

Miss Kingsworth had grown to be his friend in a score of 
ways that she, France, had not had time or opening for. She 
turned to him now, with half a dozen questions that he could 
answer best. .Yes; they were great friends and co-workers. 
France felt small, inadequate, overwhelmed. 

There was something in Leonora’s manner that bespoke it to 
have been so from the first. It had not taken time for her to 
find out Israel, — to comprehend how this young farmer-gentle- 
man could be. She, herself, had used up a whole summer-time 
in coming to her full conclusion. Leonora Kingsworth had 
begun where she left off, and had had all this beautiful, long 
winter. Of course, this had long outgrown the other. 

Israel was large and loyal. He had withdrawn nothing from 
herself ; nothing that she had not tacitly bidden him withdraw. 
But she had had the gift held out to her, and she had let it 
pass by. She was only, very quietly, secondarily now, his' 
friend. That word of the other morning sounded light and 
partial to-day, — as of small, different regard, — his “ pleasur- 
ing ” in talk with her. It had been said too easily. It reached 
for too little. With this other girl, the talk reached around 
and into all that was making up their life. 

She had to sit and hear it, and be pleased and interested 
about it. She had to be appealed to, and to give information. 
Of course, she knew all about the “Children’s Country Holiday,” 
— that lovely charity of her Boston people. And France had 
to be glad that she just did know Mr. Devereux Hartie and Mrs. 
Kellis Waite, and had been on a Correspondence Committee fot 
a little while in the good work. 


496 


ODD, OR EVEN ? 


They were going to set up a holiday house here in Fellaiden, 

— an old, relinquished parsonage, that stood on the brink of that 
beautiful North Basin, with sweet pastures running down be- 
hind toward the east. “ They are full of wild fruit all summer,” 
Leonora said, — she had found out all about the summer too, 

— “and we are going to make it self-supporting on the strength 
of it. Do you remember Mrs. Pettrell, Miss Everidge 1 ” 

“The one whom Lyman used to call the Stormy Petrel 1” 
asked France, smiling, and giving her fox a pinch under her 
mantle. “ Who used to come here with ‘ a basket of berries 
and a grievance,’ every few days 1 ” 

“ I believe she has been simply always driven before a storm. 
Miss Everidge ; I don’t think she was the making of it, any more 
than the Mother Carey’s chicken. Things — and people — 
have dealt hardly with her. Some lives do seem to run in 
such a vein. But you ought to see her with a little child ! — 
She lost three in one week, when she wasyoung.” 

“Oh!” said France pitifully. And the fox lay quiet, while 
her heart beat in real, ready sympathy for this other, — this 
old woman, and her grievous wound of long ago. “ And you 
are going to put her — ” 

“ At the head of Huckleberry House,” said Leonora. “ That 
is what we have named it. And the children are to earn — 
and have — their holiday in the fruit-picking. Mrs. Pettrell 
is great at ‘ sealing up.’ She will can cartloads in the course 
of the season, one thing after another, and make jams and 
cordials. Bernard has provided a market for the things. — 
Mr. Rael, we had better go over and look at that old sugar- 
house, I think, and see about putting up a new boiler in it.” 

This was the other end of the city labor, the beautiful 
country end, — the end she might — . Yes, though she would 
not finish the sentence, there had been two ways in which 
she might have been set at the heart of it. 

But she had let it go. She was standing outside ; she was 
only here, looking on, for a few days; it was all over, now. 


ROSE-GLORIES. 


497 


CHAPTER XLIX. 

ROSE-GLORIES. 

Miss Ammah’s liouse was dressed like a child whose things 
. have all been laid out beforehand. 

The pretty mattings — the bright blue and white in the 
southwest room, and the red in the north, with the plain, 
smooth, finewhite in the parlors, and the tile-painted oil-cloth 
in the plant-gallery between — were all down ; the simple cur- 
tains, with their light rods and rings, prepared and sent up 
from Boston, were all hung ; furniture, books, and a few pic- 
tures were quickly put into their places ; the china w^as 
unpacked and ranged in the quaintest, most charming comer- 
cupboards and upon the Eastlake dresser-shelves, built here be- 
fore Sir Charles Eastlake — or his shelves, at any rate — were 
heard of on this side the water ; and the high-post bedsteads, 
with new testers and valances, their twisted pillars and brass 
top-knobs glittering with dark polish and bright burnish, were 
made up to sleep in. 

At the end of a week, a tea-table was set in the sashed gal- 
lery, and Miss Ammah and France were established to stay, 
expecting the Heybrooks and the Kingsworths over to the 
house-warming. Sarell and Hollis, with a young sister of Mr. 
Bassett’s who was to be house-maiden, were in the pleasant 
kitchen. Mr. and Mrs. Bassett were invited guests ; but Sarell 
had set a second table here. “ There must alwers be two ends 
to a house,” she said. “ We ’ll warm this end, and I ’ll wait on 
table.” To all remonstrance she simply remarked that “ she ’d 
alwers ben one o’ them th’t hed a place f’r everything, an’ every- 
thing in its place ; an’ she found it answered.” 

It was impossible to let one’s selfbe unhappy at such a time, 
even if the days that had intervened had given nothing in the 

32 


498 


ODD, OP. EVEN? 


balance against that wilful outweighing of herself that France 
had achieved. Also, though we may say, “ It is all over ! ” 
it never is, so long as anything remains to be over with. 

There were brackets against the window-frames in the gal- 
lery, where pots of plants were to be ; meanwhile, to-night, 
bowls heaped and hung over with pinkest arbutus-blooms and 
trailing mitchella and young-sprouted feathers of fern filled 
the rings ; and a tall jar in one corner was gay with different 
tints of early tree-buds and leafage, and the golden disks of 
bold, impatient little dandelions. On the table were glass 
troughs among the dishes, with carnations and heliotropes from 
the small parsonage greenhouse. 

France had on a dress of soft white woollen, with bands of 
green silk trimming, and hair and breast knots of rosy arbutus 
and glossy wintergreen leaves and light-drooping mitchella. 
Leonora Kingsworth was in silk of sunny brown, her favorite 
color, with creamy tea-rosebuds for adornment. Here, in the 
country, one does not, happily, tire of tea-rosebuds. 

When these two came in together from the taking off of 
Leonora’s hat and wraps and a bright little visit and “ kank ” 
with Sarell in the kitchen, the metamorphosis of the old Gilley 
house was complete in the highest point, the human. 

And there is nothing like a tea-table, with bright, pleased, 
friendly people round it, for bringing the human to its brightest^ 
if not highest climax. Only, I have indulged in details already 
to the extreme prescribed limit of the Wakefield family-picture. 
I must beware of a canvas that can’t be got out of the place 
w'here it has been painted. 

Tea had been made early, and the guests were to go early. 
Farmer and Mother Heybrook must be home when the cows 
were (Lyman privately told Israel never to mind the milking 
to-night, he felt just up to the whole of it) ; Mr. Kingsworth 
had a meeting at his house later in the evening ; and all knew 
that Miss Tredgold, though heart-festive, was tired, and that 
France, who had zealously helped her, w'as yet delicate. 

The house had been inspected, as a finished whole, from end 
to end and from top to bottom ; and just the like of it, had 
been declared, was never before seen in Fellaiden. 


ROSE-GLORIES. 


499 


“But it’s what may be. I had a conscience about that,” said 
Miss Ammah eagerly ; “ and I hope nobody, if they take a 
fancy, will be bashful about ‘copying.’ Unbleached cotton, 
gray twilled crash, strainer muslin, turkey-red, plain wooden 
poles, and hollow brass idngs at twenty-five cents a dozen, — 
anybody can have these. It ’s the beauty of the new fashions. 
If only plain people will have plain sense enough to hold on to 
them when the extravagant ones have grown tired of them for 
commonness, or have exaggerated them into extravagances. 
Come back, Rael, after you have seen Mr. Kingsworth and 
Miss Leonora off. I want a home word with you and France 
to-night.” 

Miss Ammah went off to Sarell in the kitchen. France 
went out to the west doorway, where the maples, that had been 
scarlet and gold the first time she stood there, were tender with 
their opening green folds, and the low sun was level through 
them with a soft glory. 

Rael walked down the steep hillside-drive beside the minis- 
ter’s chaise. Leonoi’a leaned from it, speaking earnestly, yet 
smilingly, with him. France could not know that, although he 
walked on her side, and his hand was on the frame of the 
dasher, as if to keep them with him some lingering instants 
more, it was really the minister who had detained and led him 
on with last, just recollected words. 

He went on as far as the roadway. Then, as the little Mor- 
gan turned off and into a brisk trot, he slowly faced about, and, 
with bent, thoughtful head, retraced his steps. 

France, sitting there alone, could not know that he was ques- 
tioning with himself whether he dared come back to her alone ; 
whether this friendliness, so sweet, so hard, could rightly and 
manfully go on with him; whether he were strong enough, 
after all, to bear it. 

He knew something of what Miss Ammah’s home word was 
likely to touch upon, to-night. He had had a hint of a possible 
purpose that would be — it might be, if he could believe that 
possible — a summer blessedness, — that must be either that or 
a long summer torture, to him now. “ A home word with him 
and France.” That was what had set the keynote to his 
thoughts. Had it, perhaps, to do with hers alsol 


500 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


Rael stopped when he came up to France upon the doorstone. 
Something in the girl’s look, something her look recovered itself 
swiftly from, struck him. She rose to her feet as he spoke 
to her. 

Miss Ammah was still away in the kitchen. Her voice and 
Sarell’s were high and blithe in conversation. 

“ You are tired with it all. Miss France 1 ” 

“No — yes — perhaps so,” she answered a little hurriedly. 
“ The sunset will rest me. It ’s going to be beautiful to-night, 
Mr. Rael.” She pointed out along the ridge, straight from the 
doorway, where, up against the west, fanlike clouds were stretch- 
ing and spreading in soft, radiating lines of tawny brown. They 
held themselves over, like the fingers of a hand in benediction.- 

It was so still' and high out there upon the ridge, and the 
sunset scenery was gathering itself to be such a lovely show ! 

Yes, just this once more, — as if this once more could tell him 
something, or end anything. 

“ Do you feel like walking out there just a little way?” 

For answer, France moved across toward the low picket-gate 
that led out under the maple-tree, upon the open ridge. She 
did not know how far she would go. Rael came up with her, 
and they walked silently side by side. 

Over their heads, that wonderful sky was lighting up. The 
clouds were flaky now, the long lines broken into softest scales 
of vapor, the “ mackerel back ” that is so incomparable. 

But France moved slowly on, her face bent a trifle down. 
She had a white shawl wrapped round her ; and as she held it 
with her folded arms, she seemed to hold herself apart. 

Unexpectedly, she stood still. With a slight movement she 
threw her head erect. She did not know how clearly attitude 
and gesture spoke something that she meant to be unspoken. 

Rael stopped too. “What is it. Miss France? Will you 
turn back ? Are we going too far ? ” 

They were strange questions to her mood. 

If she had not spoken on the instant, she could not have 
said the words she did. A half breath of hesitation, and they 
would have been full of a meaning that she would not have 
uttered for the world. But as she had written that last sen- 


ROSE-GLOEIES. 501 

tence in her letter, she uttered now, under cover of a frankness 
too entire to be suspected, the absolute truth. 

“I am having a battle with myself. I am trying to be too 
proud to be mean. I am getting jealous in my friendships, 
Mr. Rael. That girl is so good and beautiful, and she is so 
much already among you all ! I have admired her till I have 
grown fierce. There, now you know ! ” And France laughed, 
a bitter, brave little laugh against herself. 

The flakes of cloud over them were rolled into soft ball- 
shapes, and the balls were turning rosy. A rose-light was on 
Israel Heybrook’s face. 

Could she care like that 1 Yet what could he assume from 
it? How could he answer her ? 

With the outspokenness, her manner changed. She moved 
forward a step or two, as if some Rubicon were passed, and the 
way could be taken quietly, as a way quite simply understood. 

“ I was your friend first, you see,” — the “you ” might mean 
again “you all” ; but that was a slender shelter, and she did 
not mark any consciousness by even taking it. She spoke with 
leisure calm, — “ and I have been proud to be.. I did not begin 
as she did. I suppose that is the real comparison and jealousy 
of it. But I want you to know how proud I have been that I 
knew you.” 

Israel paused now, and turned round to her. He answered 
nothing to all the last part of her saying, but to the first word 
of it directly. 

“ You are first,” he said as calmly as she, but with a great 
strength in his calmness. “No other friend will ever come be- 
fore you. Miss France.” 

“Is that true?” She lifted a glad face full upon him. 
“Don’t answer me. You say it, and I know it is.” 

“Yes, you know it is true. It is as true as my own soul. 
And then ? ” He reached out his hands to her with a sudden 
boldness. All his manhood asserted itself before this woman 
to whom he had said, with all the truth and fulness of his soul, 
that she was first. 

“ Then, Rael, you are first with me, for always, as you were 
before I knew it, — before I would know it.” 


502 


ODD, OR EVEN? 


All those soft balls of cloud were crimson now, like rich- 
hearted roses. They seemed to drop and drop, with a fine, 
misty trail above them in the air, like the trail of rain. The 
sky was full of falling blooms. 

The tender, melting splendor was upon their faces, turned 
toward each other. They lifted them upward. 

“ What a sky ! ” cried France, all joy- transfigured under it. 

“ It is for us,” said Rael. And he put his arm around her, 
and drew her to his strong, true heart. 

“ A-world-for-me ! A-world-for-thee ! ” 

Did they hear, or did it sing in their souls in the stillness, 
— that sweet, clear whippoorwill’s cry 1 

The roses of heaven rained and rained, till they had spilled 
all their crimson mist into floating veils again, and these lifted, 
and spread away in changing, melting purple, like vanishing 
robes of angels. 


THE BEST WOBD. 


603 


CHAPTER L. 

THE BEST WORD. 

“ I ALWAYS meant it, if this happened. That is, if they would 
have it so. What else is there for an old life to do, but to join 
itself to some young ones 1 That is what I have been after, 
among the young lives, for years. To find and try them, if 
haply they would let me, anywhere, join on. Really, not arbi- 
trarily ; I was n’t going to adopt, and repent. But Rael has 
been my boy ever since he was a man ; and France, well, I don’t 
know how I should have managed, if they had n’t managed to 
come together!” Miss Ammah said all this to Mr. Everidge, 
about her house and her property, and her “ plans for sun- 
down,” as she said. 

Rael and France were to have Rose Ridge ; they gave it that 
name among themselves, from the wonder of that night of their 
betrothal; and she was to have her home with them, just when, 
and so much as, she wanted. 

“ If I get helpless and a burden, it sha’n’t be to them,” she 
said. “ I would n’t be a burden to an own child ; for there ’s 
no need of it. There can be house enough and help enough 
and separateness enough ; I ’ve planned it all. I want to give 
them whatever good there is of me, and I ’ve made sure I do 
suit them somehow, old-woman fashion ; and they are going to 
let me share the better and the beautifuller of themselves. I 
don’t see why I should n’t have a family,” she ended, in France 
Everidge’s own precise words. 

They were to be her children ; none the less the children of 
their fathers and mothers that they were to verify those myths 
of perfection, an old maid’s children, also. 

Mr. and Mi’s. Everidge were to take the place that summer ; 
the suggestion of it had been the home word she had had for 


504 ODD, OR EVEN ? 

France and for Israel to hear that night. It was France’s very 
own bright idea of a few weeks ago, that she had not dared to 
speak. Horteuse and Cornelia would be up here ; Helen with 
the Kaynards, at Oldwoods, where they, being of the great 
cousinhood, had rooted near the Bannians. 

In the bright, early autumn would be the wedding here ; 
then the house would change hands. 

Of course, there was busy talk, down there in Boston, about 
the odd match. Helen and Euphemia gave it a great air, as well 
as they could, borrowing largely from France’s first letters of 
last summer, about the “way-oflf places of the farm,” the superb- 
ness of the hills, and the majesty of the old maple avenues. 
You can imagine, perhaps, what they would say. 

Israel Heybrook came down for a few weeks among the libra- 
ries and the bookshops, and his old professor and student- 
friends at the Institute. Then France’s people saw that she was, 
at any rate, going to marry a man. 

“ It won’t do for a precedent, though,” said an old gentleman, 
father of daughters, to his friend, Mr. Everidge, at an evening 
gathering at the Everidge house. France had certain things 
done carefully after the accustomed order that she could so 
soon be done with, that no one might suppose her to be in any 
hiding about it. “ It won’t do for a precedent. Farmers can’t 
afford to take wives out of our cities, — unless, indeed, the 
money can be made to pay for what the wife can’t be ; and that 
is n’t marriage. No, it won’t work as a principle.” 

“ I don’t know,” said Mr. Everidge thoughtfully, “ that we 
could do better with our money, or our daughters, than now 
and then to return to the soil what originally came from it, and 
to put back a transplanted living into conditions that the world 
needs over again every generation or two.” 

The father of daughters shook his head. “ Every plough- 
man is n’t an Israel Heybrook, and every drawing-room girl 
is n’t a Frances Everidge. Those two are odd ones, — but 
they ’ve made it even ! ” 

But the best thing that was said of the marriage was said in 
the hour that it took place. 


THE BEST WORD. 


505 


It was in the sunny Rose Ridge parlor, of a fair October morn- 
ing. Mr. and Mrs. Everidge, with their other children, were to 
take the noon train down to Boston. Miss Ammah was to go 
with them, and stay a month or two at the Berkeley. 

The rooms were open all through, cheery with the first slight 
touches of winter brightness, that are so pleasant while the glow 
of summer yet lingers, making pictures of warmth without and 
within that meet and mingle before the first shiver of real cold 
has come. Clear little hickory fires were burning on the low 
hearths, and the rich duskiness of soft rugs, thrown down upon 
cool mattings and canvas, gave the home-gathering look to cosey 
centres and corners. The gallery windows were fairly banked, 
with verdure and bloom, through whose perfumed screen the 
sunlight sifted. Here already were France’s own seat and low 
central table, where she should sit in the winter time that she 
had so envied of Miss Ammah, with the snows that she had craved 
to see in their magnificence shining upon the hills, and her 
husband coming in and out in the joy of the life they would 
have begun to establish “ as it might be,” as France had half 
dreamed it out before she had dared to begin to dream at all. 

Bernard Kingsworth married them. He chose to give her 
so, in the Name in which only he had had strength to give 
her up. 

When her own father and mother had kissed her, Rael took 
her hand and led her over to his mother, the modest country 
matron, who might else have waited till her turn and right had 
passed by. 

France put her arms right round her neck. 

“ Kiss her, mother ; she is my wife,” said Rael proudly. 

Mother Heybrook kissed her. Then she put her back, and 
looked at her in her young beauty and her simple, pure, white 
robes. “ She ’s a great gift, son ; but you are — Israel ! ” 

The rest of it was in her heart, as it is in the Bible, — “ As 
a prince, thou hast had power with God and man, and hast 
prevailed.” 


THE END. 




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